Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I am happy to do that. Debate is wide-ranging. I have a bill in front of me. I raised the issue. I have only spent a few minutes on these issues, and I am not going to have Senator Macdonald come here and claim that the coalition are not a government that has broken promises. They are a government that cannot be trusted. They cannot be trusted on marriage equality, health, education or any of the key issues that build a good society in this country, including the $100,000 university degrees. It goes on and on. For Senator Macdonald to come here and argue those issues is complete hypocrisy.

The issue of marriage equality is a very difficult situation and position. Senator Macdonald's argument is that we should have a referendum. We are not going to have a referendum. I hope we see some common sense and decide the matter in parliament not on some crazy plebiscite cooked up by the right wing of the coalition. Senator Williams came in and said I am voting against democracy. The way democracy works in this country is that you elect parliamentarians to make decisions after an election. That is what you do. That is how democracy works in this country. Marriage equality is not a matter of life and death. It is not a conscience matter that people keep telling me. It has been captured by the right wing of the Liberal Party and to some extent the churches, especially the Catholic Church, running the arguments against marriage equality. I did not ask Most Reverend Anthony Fisher, the Archbishop of Sydney in the Catholic Church, to write to me to tell me what I should be thinking about in terms of marriage equality. What I think on marriage equality has nothing to do with the Archbishop.

I have come late to this debate. I do not come here saying that I have fought for marriage equality all of my life. I was 27 years a blue-collar union official. I was a blue-collar worker before that. I did not think a lot about the lives that were being decimated around this country by homophobic attitudes towards LGBT people in this country. I did not think about that. Shame on me—I did not do that. I did not realise it, but I did when I became a senator, and I have told this before. One of my constituents from the suburb of Greystanes in the western suburbs of Sydney—a mother—rang me crying because of her son, who had been brought up in the western suburbs of Sydney. He was gay. He had been targeted by homophobic behaviour at school and after school, and this kid had a terrible life in school and in his formative years, being attacked on the issue of his sexuality. The mother said to me that he had found love. He had a same-sex partner. They were in a loving relationship and they wanted to get married. For the first time in his life, he was actually happy.

I do not think this would be an unusual story for many people after I have started to engage in this debate. This would not be an isolated incident. For those people that want to get married, in my view, they should be allowed to get married. If people love each other, why should some homophobic attitude pushed by some our colleagues in both the Senate and the House of Representatives stop people from entering a loving relationship?

The last time we had this debate there were discussions about the 'sanctity' of marriage. That puts marriage in a religious context. Marriage has not always been a religious issue; marriage is not a religious issue. I have now been married for 45 years. I was not married in a church or a chapel; I had an ordinary marriage in a registry office in Scotland because my wife was Catholic and I was Protestant. We did not want to get engaged in any of that. We did not want to tell our kids what religion to be brought up in or whether they would have a religion. So we decided to have a civil ceremony. The civil ceremony that I engaged in, that has kept my marriage for 45 years, was no less important than any marriage in a church. And I think my marriage has lasted a lot longer than many church marriages, where the sanctimonious position has been taken and people have given vows. I have had a marriage for 45 years, with all its ups and downs—as every marriage has—

Senator Williams interjecting—

Yes! We are not saying anywhere that if the view of the churches is that being married in a church when you have a same-sex partner is some abomination against God, or any of that, that they do that. That is not what is being proposed here. I just think that is an absolute nonsense argument anyway. I say that one day churches will start providing same-sex marriages within churches because that is going to be seen to be part of the process of keeping churches alive and keeping churches at least a little bit relevant to what is happening in the rest of the community.

After I spoke to that woman I was really concerned that I had not dealt with this issue effectively as a parliamentarian. I then went to Albury-Wodonga on a Senate reference committee hearing. I was having a cup of tea in one of the cafes in Albury and a middle-aged guy came up and said hello. He introduced himself and said, 'Look, I know who you are and I just want to put a proposition to you. I have lived in the Albury-Wodonga area all my life. It's a regional-rural area. I'm gay and my life has been hell in terms of the homophobic attitudes that have been taken against me. But, again, I have found peace, I've found love and I've found happiness. I have been with my partner for 10 years and we want to get married. I've got the support of my family, I've got the support of my friends—why can't you politicians just give me the opportunity to get married?'

After that there was a lot of debate within the Labor Party. With the arguments that Senator Macdonald put up about how strongly people believe in this, I do not see any reason why people should not give others the same rights as they have in a democratic country. I suppose that, as an atheist, it makes it easier for me to raise these issues. I suppose if you have a deeply religious point of view then, yes, these points come into play. But if you are religious and you are demanding religious tolerance and the right to exercise your religion, both that tolerance and those rights should not be exercised at the expense of gay people in this country, or transgender people or lesbians. They should not be treated differently because some people have a religious point of view on this. They should not!

Clearly, this should be a position that is determined without any interference from the churches. The separation of church and state should come into play. We should have a clear separation and we should show some backbone—actually have the debates and have decisions on marriage equality in this parliament. That is what we should do.

Senator MacDonald said that he had heard no arguments about why we should not have this plebiscite and let the people decide. Just recently, there was one big argument. If we want to talk about financial arguments, let's look at the cost of this plebiscite. The cost of the plebiscite is going to be about $158.4 million—$158 million because we are not prepared to make a decision in the interests of all Australians!

The funding to the ACCC is $132 million. The funding for rural assistance is $205 million. The funding for APRA is $121 million. And for natural disaster relief we get $33 million. So we are prepared to spend $158.4 million because the Prime Minister of this country does not have the courage and does not have the backbone to stand up for what he proclaims are his values, for marriage equality. I am just beginning to wonder whether the Prime Minister ever did have any of the values that he proclaims he has, because if he did he would not capitulate to the right wing and the homophobes in the coalition, and he would not capitulate to the worst elements in our society. He would stand up for his values and have a parliamentary vote, both in the House of Representatives and in the Senate, to give our fellow Australians equal rights.

What is going on is a nonsense. Senator Macdonald's argument that nobody has said there is a problem here is wrong, because people have raised the cost of this. But it is not only a financial cost: this is about a cost to the LGBTI community itself. We have seen the Australian Christian Lobby getting out and talking about 18C, that racial discrimination and discrimination should not apply during this plebiscite. So they want a free ticket to get out and attack people who are not heterosexuals and who do not fit their view of what a normal society should look like. I would hate to see a normal society if they were all like George Christensen. What kind of normal society would that be? The guy is out there spewing hatred, spewing homophobic views and not being called to account by the coalition. He is not being called to account.

We take the view that the Christian Lobby should be ignored, that people with crazy views like George Christensen should be ignored and that we should put our fellow Australians first because we do not want their mental position diminished even more because of attacks during a plebiscite. We do not want this position that they are pushing where they are going to have a debate about whether they are real Australians, whether they are real human beings, whether they are aberrations. These are our fellow Australians. They are the people who we should support. We should support them.

The cost of this plebiscite is a nonsense. We should support the gay community, the lesbian community and the transgender community. We should make the decision here, and we should do it because it is the right thing to do to make sure that people who love each other have an opportunity to get married.