Kerry Nettle (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I will sum up the debate on the motion before us, which I am proud to be moving, by reading a letter that I have received from a man living in Canberra. He writes:

I am a 58 year old gay man who has been living in Canberra with my partner (of similar age) for the past 14 years.

We are both ex-servicemen. His was a long career in the army, mine a short one as a National Serviceman in 1969-1971.

We have both worked extensively in the Australian Public Service; in my case, in Social Security, Health, and Veterans Affairs portfolios for many years.

Each of us has at various times held Top Secret security clearances either in the military or in sensitive public service portfolios.

Both of us have lived the majority of our lives in situations where our relationship was considered to be criminal, in one state or another.

Throughout my partner’s military career he kept his sexuality utterly secret, since the alternative (till the early 1990s) would have been summary discharge from the Services. I was more fortunate in that the public service reformed its attitude a little earlier.

Governments were happy to accept our contribution to the national good, but for many years they did so on the condition that we lied about our personal lives and pretended to be something we were not. As for entitlements, we were expected to be grateful for not being arrested.

Those days of hypocrisy and persecution are largely past. But whilst all Australian states and territories have now decriminalised same-sex relationships, we are not accorded recognition by social security, superannuation, health, and taxation systems controlled by the federal government. Though we pay for our share, we don’t receive our share. And our schools are still reluctant to teach kids that gay sexuality is ok, and many teachers turn a blind eye to victimisation and bashing.

I have once experienced being the target of gay-hate violence. Half a dozen thugs with baseball bats attacked me just a few years ago here in Canberra. If I weren’t both lucky and prepared to stand up for myself, I would have died that night. Some of my friends have been less fortunate.

The continued existence of this sort of anti-gay violence is due in great measure to those who seek to impose on the entire community their narrow view of what is “moral”, and who seek to use gays as scapegoats to blame for society’s ills. I recall all too well the attempt by some religious groups in the 1980s to blame gay men for HIV/AIDS and to cynically use HIV as a weapon to try to drive society back into the sectarianism and hypocrisy that characterised the 1950s.

Certain religious groups still have no hesitation in promoting the most appalling and dishonest anti-gay propaganda in the name of “family values”. But as I recall, the Nazis also claimed to be committed to family values, and were equally intolerant of freedom of choice. Tens of thousands of homosexual men were interned by the Nazis, and many of them perished in concentration camps. It was not the first time we had been used as scapegoats by political or religious fanatics, nor was it the last time.

I consider myself to be a highly moral and principled person, a quality I attribute to the nurture of my late parents. My family has always been absolutely supportive of me and my partner, and my siblings often travel to stay with us at Christmas or new year.

I have made (and am continuing to make) a significant contribution to the society in which I live. Those with whom I have worked have always respected my contribution, and have had no difficulty with the fact that I am an openly gay man. Likewise, those with whom I am involved in amateur sport at ACT and national levels respect me for my contribution and my honesty, not because I am or am not gay.

I am proud to be an Australian, and thankful that over the past 30-40 years our country has gradually become a fairly tolerant and welcoming place for most people.

But every step of the way over the past thirty-forty years, attempts to remove the punitive and discriminatory laws that made me and my partner second-class citizens have been met by ideological bigots claiming that to remove such discrimination would somehow damage the rights of those who suffered no such ill-treatment. What poppycock.

I’m truly sick of the whingeing and whining that comes from the religious conservatives every time someone obstructs a little of their pathological crusade against gay men.

The proposed ACT legislation does not equate civil unions with marriage. To complain, as the Attorney General has done, that it “implies” equality shows just how much influence religious bigots have over a supposedly secular federal government.

Living in Canberra I am also sick of the disadvantage every ACT resident endures. Namely, having substantially less representation in federal parliament than Tasmania which has hardly more population than we do, and having our legislation and planning decisions threatened or overturned by federal government bully-boys.

Whether on this issue or any other, it is intolerable that Australian citizens in the two territories do not have true self-determination in the manner that people in the states do. Those of you who come from states might care to think how you would feel if the federal parliament could over-ride your state’s laws.

My partner and I still have our military service medals. Sometimes I wonder if we should send them back, since our contribution to the military service of this country is apparently not considered sufficiently worthy to accord us the entitlements that most people take for granted.

If the federal government decides to go out on the limb of extremist intervention, I will protest in every way I can. But whether or not protests succeed, the fact is that the proposed meddling in ACT legislation is driven by conservative religious ideology dressed up in the false guise of “family values”. To support such intervention would be a dishonest and obscene attack on the secular constitution our nation adopted in 1901.

I hope that you and most other members of the federal parliaments will reject any attempt to interfere with the ACT Government’s legislation on same-sex unions, whether directly or indirectly.

I know that this issue is not simply a party matter. There is a range of views in political parties. My experience suggests that most people with a negative attitude to gay issues have not met and dealt with openly gay men or women. It’s easier to demonise something that you’ve always avoided.

It’s high time the federal parliament stopped avoiding the issue of its discriminatory laws. We are all citizens and there should not be one law for my brother and a different law for me.

I am happy to take unpaid leave from my job to come and see any MPs or Senators at Parliament House, so that they can meet in person one of the many people who has had to fight tooth-and-nail all his life to get some measure of fairness from governments. Someone who for most of his life was arbitrarily classified as a criminal, denied the protection of the law, and refused the entitlements that my siblings are given automatically.

           …         …         …

I sincerely wish you and your family the same peace and security that I seek to have accorded to myself and my partner.

They are the words of a gentleman in the ACT who is calling on senators here today to vote to remove discrimination. We heard—from the government minister who spoke on this legislation, the Leader of the Government in the Senate—that the government wants to remove discrimination. Today is the opportunity for the federal government to vote to remove discrimination and allow couples—like this man and the many other people from whom I and, I am sure, other members of parliament have received letters—to have their relationships openly recognised in the parliament and before the law.

This is about allowing people to have their relationships recognised in all aspects of life. There was a letter to a newspaper last week about a man who had taken his partner with him when he went to hospital for surgery that he needed, but the hospital did not recognise him as the next of kin. The surgeons refused to carry out the operation and they had to wait there until they were able to get the man’s estranged elderly father to give permission before the operation could go ahead.

Today is the opportunity for people to vote to remove that form of discrimination. I have attended weddings—gay, illegal weddings—that have been beautiful and loving ceremonies of the commitment between two people. We have the opportunity to have those relationships recognised before the law. It is an opportunity to say to the children of gay and lesbian parents that you see their family as a genuine family. I was walking down Oxford Street in Sydney as part of a rally on this issue with a group of children, some of whom are the children of my friends in same-sex relationships. There were hundreds of people marching down the street and, as we were walking along, everyone was singing the song: ‘Going to the chapel and we’re gonna get married.’ That was what they wanted because they wanted their parents to be able to do that so that they could be recognised as a genuine family.

By not recognising the rights of those children to be part of a genuine family where both of their parents are recognised as legitimate parents before the law we are discriminating against those children, and we should not do so. We should allow these families to unite themselves before the law and to be recognised before the law, whether it is at hospital or filling in forms at the department of housing or the Department of Veterans’ Affairs. We need to allow this discrimination to be removed, and today is the opportunity for us to do that.

Today is also the opportunity to remove the discrimination for people who live in the ACT or in the Northern Territory who do not have their rights heard in the same way as other Australian citizens in the states. That is the opportunity that we have here today, and I commend this disallowance motion to the Senate. I appeal to all senators to vote today to remove discrimination; to vote today for the rights of territorians; and to vote today for all Australians to have their relationships recognised before the law.

Question put:

That the motion (by Senators Ludwig, Stott Despoja and Nettle) be agreed to.