Bread, cake and justice

Bread, cake and justice

RODNEY CROOME

The Government’s elimination of financial discrimination against same-sex partners is the most broad-ranging and important gay law reform since Federation.

This reform is important because it brings to a successful conclusion the 40-year movement to protect and entitle de facto partners, regardless of their gender.

Yet there has there been very little interest in this reform in the broader community, or enthusiasm for it among gays and lesbians.

Several metropolitan newspapers forgot to include it in the Rudd Government’s list of first year achievements.

The gay street press seems more interested in what’s missing from the current reform than what’s included.

One reason is that this reform is long overdue.

During the Senate’s debate on reform, Shadow Attorney-General, George Brandis, regretted that the Howard Government blocked change for so long.

So he should.

But there’s another, sadder reason the significance of same-sex de facto reform has been overlooked.

The Federal Government made the grave strategic error of putting forward the recognition of same-sex de facto couples as a kind of substitute or compensation for not allowing those same partners to marry.

The Government’s spruiking of same-sex de facto reform always has a rider that it will not countenance same-sex marriage.

The same political games are played with state civil partnership registries.
Such registries were designed as a way for couples who can’t or don’t wish to marry to formalise their unions.

Yet the Rudd Government has inappropriately positioned them as a response to the demand for same-sex marriage.

While we watch everyone else eat their slice of wedding cake, we are told to settle for the bread of financial equity and relationship certificates.

The Rudd Government has one last chance to redeem itself and its reform agenda in the eyes of the gay and lesbian community.

It must disentangle the recognition of de facto couples and the establishment of civil partnership registries from the debate on same-sex marriage.

It can do this by advocating the two former reforms in their own right, and by no longer using these reforms to dodge the critical question -” why can’t same-sex partners marry?

If it doesn’t, history is sure to overtake it.

At exactly the same time as the recognition of same-sex de facto couples has exposed marriage discrimination as the last outpost of bigotry in national law, the protest movement sparked by the nullification of same-sex marriage in California has gone global.

Under these conditions it is inevitable that Australia’s disparate marriage equality advocates will coalesce into a movement, and that the reform of marriage will move to the centre of national debate.

The hard choice facing the Rudd Government is to engage constructively with this national and global demand for justice.

If it doesn’t, the many good things that flow from its current reforms will quickly be forgotten and only what it failed to do, recalled.

info: Rodney Croome is a spokesman for the Tasmanian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby and the Australian Coalition for Equality.

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