George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I move opposition amendment (1) on sheet 5617 revised:

(1)    Schedule 1, item 21, page 10 (lines 20 to 25), omit subclause (5), substitute:

        (5)    For the purposes of this Act a de facto relationship can exist between 2 persons of different sexes and between 2 persons of the same sex.

The first of the opposition’s amendments is to item 21 of the bill. The purpose of the amendment is to omit from the proposed definition of ‘de facto relationship’ in the new section 4AA of the bill the words in subsection (5)—‘a de facto relationship can exist even if one of the persons is legally married to someone else or in another de facto relationship’—so that subsection (5) of the proposed section 4AA would merely provide ‘that for the purposes of the act a de facto relationship can exist between two persons of different sexes and between two persons of the same sex’.

Concern was raised by a number of witnesses before the Senate inquiry into this and related bills that the provisions of the proposed section 4AA(5)(b) would seem to countenance a polygamous situation. It may very well be, particularly having regard to the existing provisions of section 6 of the Family Law Act which are not affected by this bill, that the omission of these words will not change the law, but nor will the inclusion of these words change the law, so we are not, in this context, talking about matters of substance. But there are important issues of symbolism and the use of statutory language which have been an aspect of this debate, and for those reasons the opposition is of the view that paragraph (b) of proposed section 4AA(5) should be deleted.