Janet Rice (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answer given by the Attorney-General (Senator Brandis) to a question without notice asked by Senator Rice today relating to parliamentary consideration of marriage equality legislation.

Senator Brandis, in response to my question about marriage equality, clearly was genuine in his support for the massive 61 per cent yes vote announced today. He was clearly part of the majority of Australians that were very pleased by this result. But my question went to turning the result, the support that was expressed in that vote, into legislation that can go through this parliament as quickly as possible. We need to turn that profoundly resounding vote into reality, turn it into legislation so we can achieve equality for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and gender-diverse, intersex and queer Australians as soon as possible.

Today's result is the result of a long campaign—a long campaign since 2004 when former Prime Minister John Howard changed the Marriage Act to define marriage to only be between a man and a woman. Since that time, we have seen 22 proposed bills in this parliament to change that legislation, to recognise equality—to recognise that love between gay and lesbian, bisexual, intersex, transgender and queer people is equal to the love of other people. The Greens have been involved in many of those 22 bills; in fact, we have the resounding record of being the party that in every vote in every parliament has voted for equality. Today we are here very much standing on the shoulders of giants, including former senators Bob Brown, Kerry Nettle, Andrew Bartlett—who is back here with us again—Natasha Stott-Despoja and Sarah Hanson-Young. So many pieces of legislation have been introduced in this parliament but have not achieved success. We shouldn't have had to go through this marriage survey; we should have been able to decide the issue here in this parliament. But, when it was forced upon us, the community rose up and said resoundingly, 'Yes, we want to have equality'. We need to turn that support into legislation as quickly as possible. We need to give due justice to the campaigners, because it hasn't been just us parliamentarians who have been fighting hard for equality for well over a decade. Many other people have been involved, including the people of Australian Marriage Equality—Tom Snow, Anna Brown, Teirnan Brady—and those in various other campaigns, such as Rodney Croome, Shelley Argent, Felicity Marlowe from Rainbow Families, as well as so many thousands and thousands of other Australians.

My social media feed over the last hour, since the result of the vote has been known, has been filled with outpourings of emotion, outpourings of just being so pleased that, finally, their relationships are recognised by Australians as being as valid as any others. I want to make sure that we get legislation through this parliament as quickly as possible, and we will have to work across party lines. We're going to have a bill introduced here this afternoon and it's got to be legislation that reflects the fact that people have voted for equality, they have not voted for extra discrimination. They haven't voted to erode antidiscrimination provisions. They have voted for equal rights for same-sex-attracted and gender-diverse people. That's what needs to be reflected in the legislation. We didn't get from the Attorney-General today a guarantee that the government was definitely behind making sure that we didn't have extra discrimination bolted onto marriage equality legislation, and that's what we need to ensure. We don't need extra discrimination. We can have protection for people's religious beliefs, but we do not have to have extra discrimination bolted onto this legislation. I really hope that we will be able to get legislation through this parliament in our last two weeks of sitting so that same-sex-attracted and gender-diverse people, along with all Australians, can celebrate. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.