Sue Lines (WA, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Bill 2017. I want to say at the outset that I'm extremely proud to do so. I've spoken in this chamber many times before of my absolute, 100 per cent, support for changing the Marriage Act to enable LGBTIQ people in Australia to be able to marry, if that's their choosing, the person that they love. We know, and certainly those of us that have advocated strongly for same-sex marriage know, that love is love and it should not discriminate. It's only recently been discriminatory in this country. We know that, under Prime Minister Howard, the Marriage Act was changed to insert the definition of 'a man and a woman'. As many of us noted in this chamber before, that was done without any kerfuffle, with no public consultation; it was simply done and it became the law. Sadly, that simple act made many Australians feel like somewhat second-class citizens.

I want to focus on that for a little bit because whether the Marriage Act is changed or not makes no difference to me, none whatsoever. I have a choice right now about whether I choose marriage or not. In my own personal circumstance, I've chosen marriage twice and I'm choosing, in my long-term relationship right now, not to choose it a third time. That's always been my choice, but sadly it has not been the choice of many dear friends of mine. Whilst I think that marriage is a somewhat outdated, old-fashioned concept, I nevertheless accept that to deny people the opportunity to make that choice for themselves—to choose to marry the one that they love—is a deeply personal and discriminatory matter. What has well and truly opened my eyes over the last few years, and particularly during this debate, is how personally that issue of not being able to marry the one that you love—of having that choice—resonates with people.

My very dear friends Carolyn and Dee have been in a committed relationship for more than 20 years. They are some of my best and closest friends, and I love them dearly. Recently we celebrated a milestone in their relationship. They don't actually want to get married, but the fact that they've been denied that opportunity has made them feel like second-class citizens. That's what has hurt me throughout this debate. I'm someone who stands for fairness and equality, and I'll fight to the bitter end for things to be fair and equal. I really had no understanding of how LGBTIQ people in our community felt, but I was standing with Carolyn and Dee when the decision came down a couple of Wednesdays ago and both of them cried. In her day job, Carolyn is a tough union official. She's the secretary of United Voice in Western Australia, and every day she's confronted with unfairness and she's out there advocating fiercely for the rights of workers. Rarely have I seen Carolyn cry, but on that Wednesday morning—it was 7 am in Perth when we got the decision; it was nice to get it so early—she cried, not, as I said at the outset, because she personally wants to get down on bended knee and ask Dee to marry her but because it lifted that view that she felt had been imposed upon her that somehow she was a second-class citizen. I know that many of my LGBTIQ friends who are in the same circumstances have also felt that.

Whilst Labor fought the survey bitterly—it wasn't where we wanted to go, but, once we were in the fight, we were determined to campaign really hard and to make sure that we got a very strong 'yes' vote—this survey result has meant something much more to many Australians in our community. It has finally said to them: 'You are equal.' I can't believe that someone as smart and sassy and as strong a fighter as my friend Carolyn would feel like that, but she did. At the Labor Party conference this year, she gave the most amazing personal speech. She shouldn't have had to do that. I haven't had to stand up and talk about all of the awful trials and tribulations that I had as a 15-year-old. But we expected that, and people in same-sex relationships have done that right across Australia. Those personal stories have been heartfelt and deeply, deeply personal, as it was for Carolyn. She talked about the struggles she had as a teenager. She gave a very powerful personal account of all of the issues she had faced—disappointing her parents, outing herself and acknowledging that she would be an outcast in society and that some people would judge her because of her sexual preference. All of that was deeply personal. So, when the 'yes' vote came down, for people like Carolyn, who, as I say, is not going to choose marriage, it said to people like Carolyn and Dee: 'You are equal. We live in a fair society. We believe that you should have the same rights as everyone else.'

The other person that really struck me during this debate was Jennifer Westacott. I listened to her in an interview on radio. Jennifer Westacott is not someone I would normally agree with. She heads up the Business Council. She has supported penalty rate cuts. She is not very fond of unions. She doesn't really align with my values. Jennifer Westacott, who I would certainly acknowledge is someone who has done very well for herself in her life, as she has been at the forefront of business in Australia, described the feeling that she had all her life as one of being an outsider. Jennifer Westacott, who is central to what happens in business in this country, who lobbies the government and the opposition about a whole range of issues and who comes across as very confident and able—of course, she is very accomplished—said she has felt like an outsider her whole life because of her same-sex relationship. She felt that her relationship was treated without the respect and legitimacy given to married couples. That interview—probably about six or seven weeks ago on Radio National on the Breakfast program—was quite astounding. I sat and listened and thought, 'Wow, if someone like Jennifer Westacott and someone like Carolyn Smith at United Voice can say how they have felt like second-class citizens in this country, that's really saying something.'

When that 'yes' vote came down so overwhelmingly a couple of Wednesdays ago, it just lifted that cloud. That's a really profound thing. It's not really something that we have celebrated in this country. Yes, all people who love one another should have the right to get married if that's their choice, but this other deeply profound lifting of that shroud of people feeling, personally, that they are no longer second-class in our country is something much greater. The fact that that's now a reality is something that really pleases me. It's something that I'm very proud of.

The other thing that I'm proud of is that I come from the state of Western Australia. Sometimes, we're a bit conservative in the west. We don't always jump on board. We had the Liberals at their recent conference—thankfully, they have backed away from that now—saying that we should secede and become our own state. But they've put that to one side, thankfully. We're a long way from the east coast and we now have a three-hour time difference. So, sometimes, we feel a bit left out, a bit unloved and a bit neglected. But, in my state of Western Australia, we had a really high participation rate, with 78.4 per cent of Western Australians taking the opportunity to vote—and we voted yes overwhelmingly. Every electorate in Western Australia, from the south of Western Australia to the north, voted yes overwhelmingly. I was so proud. Western Australians, you outdid me.

Before I go on to talk some more about that, I just want to mention my dad. He passed away a couple of weeks ago. He was 95 years old. He was a wonderful dad. I loved him deeply and I'm very sad that he's gone. One of the last things that he did was vote yes. I was a little bit scared to broach the conversation with him, but, as an advocate for marriage equality, we were being urged to have that conversation with our family members. So I plucked up the courage—it's not that dad was a scary person; he wasn't; but it was pretty personal to ask him how he was going to vote—and I said, 'Dad, how are you going to vote in the same-sex postal survey?' He said to me, 'I'm voting yes because the time has come.' So, for me, that pretty much summed up the view of a lot of West Australians—that the time had come. One of the last things my dad did before he passed away was to vote yes in the same-sex postal survey. I'm proud of my dad, anyway, but I'm very proud that he did that. He came out of hospital, got his ballot paper out, marked it up and sent it off.

I'm also proud of the work that our team did in our duty electorates. As Labor senators, we have electorates that we are responsible for across the country, and my electorates are Curtin, Moore and Swan. I have to say I'm taking some credit for the 'yes' vote in those electorates. They had outstanding results—certainly amongst the highest across the country. I'm very pleased to say that if we look at the seat of Moore—which is held by Mr Ian Goodenough, who has been a very public 'no' campaigner in this debate—84 per cent of the electorate of Moore participated and, overwhelmingly, they voted yes. In the seat of Swan, which is the seat that I live in, our member is Mr Steve Irons. I'm not quite sure of his views on marriage equality—and I say that as a voter in Swan—because he certainly never shared them with the electorate. So I don't really know whether Mr Irons supports yes or no. I know that very early on he advocated a 'no' vote, but I'm not going to hold that up as his view now, because I don't know. But the fact that, as a voter of Swan, I don't know his views says something about his inability or lack of initiative to get out there and campaign. Nonetheless, I campaigned in Swan. We campaigned very strongly for a 'yes' vote and that's what we got: a very strong 'yes' vote in Swan, my own electorate that I live in. I'm very pleased to report that.

The last electorate we worked hard in was Curtin, which is held by Ms Bishop, our foreign minister. She came out at the eleventh hour and said that she was supporting a 'yes' vote, but, to the best of my knowledge, she certainly didn't campaign in Curtin. By the time she came out and said yes it was a little bit late, but Curtin recorded a very high participation rate. Something like 84 per cent of voters in Curtin participated in the postal survey, and we recorded a 'yes' vote there. I wore my heart on my sleeve. I do that a lot, but over this issue I was proud to. I went out in Moore, which is considered to be quite a conservative electorate, and pushed the 'yes' vote. I pushed the 'yes' vote in Swan and in Curtin, and Western Australians agreed with me and voted overwhelmingly, in those three electorates, to change the Marriage Act.

The other electorates in Western Australia held by the Liberals have been disappointing. We have heard very little in Durack, very little in O'Connor and very little in the seat of Canning, which is held by Mr Hastie, another very strong opponent of same-sex marriage. Canning is an interesting electorate. It is often conservative, but it voted, I think, above the national average in favour of same-sex marriage. In the seat of Forrest, we heard very little from Ms Marino about her views on same-sex marriage, yet it, like every other electorate in Western Australia, returned a 'yes' vote.

Normally in this country we say that 50 per cent plus one is enough, and that's democracy. In this case we got a much higher vote than that, so I'm somewhat perplexed and disappointed that we are still having a debate about same-sex marriage. It is time for us to get on with the job. Our job, as legislators in this place, is to legislate for fairness, to legislate for equality and to legislate so that Carolyn and Dee and people like Jennifer Westacott no longer feel like second-class citizens in their own country. That's the job before us. There is no proof that anyone who voted no—which was their absolute right to do so—held any other views. Indeed, we know that religion in this country is on the wane. The number of people in the last census who said they held a religious view dropped. So to suddenly take the 'no' vote—as some are doing in this place—and say, 'People who voted no meant this and they meant that, and they want further religious freedoms,' is an absolute nonsense. In the same way that I couldn't say they didn't vote that way, others surely cannot say they did vote that way because they wanted a certain outcome. People were given a choice in a non-binding postal survey to vote one way or the other on the question of whether the Marriage Act should be changed. That's what we were given the opportunity to vote on, and, overwhelmingly, Australians voted yes. That's because we still are an egalitarian country. That's because in our hearts we believe in fairness. That's because in our hearts we believe in equality. It's that simple. It has nothing to do with what's taught at schools—goodness me!

When my kids were at school, I wanted them to have a good education; that's what I wanted. Yes, I was an active parent and, from time to time, would have a bit of a barney with the teachers. There were some things in the curriculum that I disagreed with, but it was the curriculum and I wanted my children to have a balanced education, not necessarily to pick up the left-wing Labor views of their mother—even though I'd like them to. They had to be free to make up their own minds; that's how our education system is in this country. Yes, bullying at school is a big issue. It's a big issue if you're slightly different, if the colour of your skin is different, if the shape of your eyes is different or if your sexual orientation is different. So, surely, we as fair Australians and Australians who believe in equality want our schools to teach about not judging people because they look a bit different to you, have a different political view or have different point of view—that is what our education system does. As for this nonsense about bakers, I'm seriously not going to go there. I can't believe that we've had any time in the media devoted to giving exemptions to bakers. I mean, please, that makes us look like a joke!

It is time in this parliament, finally, for us to just get this done. In the words of our leader, Mr Shorten, a couple of Wednesdays ago, 'Today is the day that we celebrate and tomorrow is the day that we legislate.' I'm really proud to have had this moment in the Senate today to say, 'Let's get on with this.' Let's make marriage a reality for anyone who loves their partner deeply enough to want to make that commitment. But, more than that, let's remove the stigma for the Jennifer Westacotts, the Carolyns and the Dees of the world, and the thousands and thousands of other couples who currently feel like they are second-class Australians. Regardless of where you stand in this debate, no-one wants that, and there's one way to avoid that, and that's to get on with same-sex marriage—to get it done and to make it a reality.