In the New Zealand Parliament, they were singing. Yes, singing in celebration of the vote to legalise same-sex marriage. A century-old Maori love song, no less. Can you picture anything like that happening in Canberra? My boyfriend of 14 years and I sat on the couch with our dog Oscar in our apartment on Wednesday night and watched the news. We could only imagine.
Pokarekare Ane is thought to have been composed some time around World War I. It’s been translated into English and is often played at ceremonies involving both New Zealand and Australia: My poor pen is broken, my paper is spent / But my love for you endures, and remains forever more. / Oh my beloved, come back to me, my heart is breaking of love for you.
A native of New Zealand’s north island, my partner, whose name is also Steven – it’s so convenient for people at functions and parties to remember us – had texted me at work last week with the news his Australian citizenship had been approved. He was chuffed that the next step was the citizen ceremony, where he would make some sort of pledge. I was beginning to think we didn’t deserve him.
As the New Zealand Parliament legalised same-sex marriage (not gay marriage, please, you don’t need that sexual identity to qualify), and the vote was a convincing 77 to 44 in favour, I wondered if we would get a better deal if we took a plane across the ditch. Steve and I would certainly feel included in society.
Margaret Thatcher thought there was no such thing as society. Around the same time as the New Zealand Parliament super-sized its legalised civil unions to same-sex marriage, they were burying the former British prime minister royally in London. In the late 1980s, Thatcher’s Conservative Party introduced Section 28, which forbid the “promotion” of homosexuality. She danced an oppressive pas de deux with US president Ronald Reagan across the Atlantic. He couldn’t even mention the words AIDS.
In Australia in 2013, our conservatives simply wear a different cloak. Julia Gillard, our Prime Minister who remains unmoved by the New Zealand example, gives gay, lesbian and bisexual people plenty of reasons to maintain a historically well-developed sense of oppression. Her continued opposition to same-sex marriage is nonsensical – the electorate is largely supportive – but it doesn’t need to make sense. This is all about self-interested power, fear and lack of leadership.
Simply, the ALP national executive controlling Gillard’s views on this issue are as socially conservative as Opposition Leader Tony Abbott, who clings to the notion marriage is for one man, one woman. At least we can see where this capital-C Catholic is coming from. Both major parties are afraid of what the large pockets of voters in Queensland and western Sydney might think. Those voters are being sold intellectually short.
In New Zealand, it was the Labour Party that introduced the same-sex marriage bill, but conservative Prime Minister John Key backed it. Perhaps the “u” in NZ Labour stands for “us”. In Australia, we call it the Labor Party, where the Catholic roots need a new dye job. Labor’s failure to separate church and state is as pernicious as any such ideology lingering in Abbott, a former seminary trainee.
So will Australia get same-sex marriage, joining New Zealand, Argentina, Belgium, Canada, Denmark, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, Uruguay, nine US states, and soon, Britain and France?
Not under Gillard. Not under Abbott. The country needs a change, but not simply of government.
The Opposition’s shadow minister for communications, Malcolm Turnbull, told Radio National in late 2011 he hadn’t historically advocated same-sex marriage, but would now be willing to vote according to his constituency’s wishes, “and I don’t have any doubt that there’s a large majority of people that support same-sex marriage”.
Labor’s Employment Minister Bill Shorten personally supports same-sex marriage.
Tony Abbott meanwhile thinks his sister Christine Forster is “courageous” for revealing herself to be a lesbian. He may think she’s brave but he certainly doesn’t consider her his equal. Julia Gillard, who’s never believed in marriage for herself, wants to withhold it from others, because that’s her Machiavellian way. She’s painfully alert to misogyny, but is blind to ALP parliamentary homophobia.
Same-sex couples deserve health, happiness and to be part of society. Their children deserve to have parents supported by society. Same-sex marriage won’t harm heterosexual marriages, and in the unlikely event they did, perhaps those unions weren’t strong enough in the beginning.
In that traditional Maori song, they got it dead right: I have written you a letter, and enclosed it with my ring / If your people should see it, then the trouble will begin. What, exactly, has Canberra got against happiness?
Author: Steve Dow
Publication: SMH
Publication Date: April 18 2013