Sarah Hanson-Young (SA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the minister for her response. I want to make it very clear that, unfortunately, because we are not able to mandate private commercial funds to adopt these definitions—I would like to think that most of them will, but we cannot mandate them—and the government and the opposition are now not supporting an amendment to allow people to know, publicly, on the record, which funds do support that definition and which do not, we need to be very careful about how we report the entitlements being handed over today to same-sex couples. I think that this suite of bills is long overdue, and I welcome it. What I would like to have been able to do today is say that all same-sex couples in Australia, regardless of whether they work in the public or private sector, were guaranteed these entitlements. Unfortunately, we are not able to do that.