Rainbow families tell parliament about the postal survey’s negative impact
Rainbow Families NSW has told a parliamentary committee what it was like being subjected to the marriage equality debate last year, in a submission to the Inquiry into Arrangements for the Postal Survey.
The inquiry was established to examine the process of the postal survey, including the parliament’s protections against offensive, misleading or intimidating material or behaviour, especially towards affected communities.
Rainbow Families co-chair Vanessa Gonzalez said that postal survey was a tough time for many in our community, particularly parents of young children who were exposed to materials that painted LGBTI families in an extremely negative light.
“Even though the parliament enacted protections against vilification, and to ensure that advertising aligned with existing electoral law, those protections were not enough to safeguard our families from ending up on the frontline of a divisive debate that caused great harm to many in our community,” she said.
“Once the door was opened to this debate by the government it was our families that ended up on the frontline.”
Co-Chair Mat Howard said that children of same-sex couples were previously targeted in overseas marriage debates.
“When the idea of a plebiscite was raised, Rainbow Families campaigned against a divisive public poll, precisely because when marriage equality was debated in France, Ireland, the US and UK, the children of same-sex couples became the focus of some hurtful statements and campaigns,” he said.
“We did not want that to happen here. And we do not want it to happen to any group ever again.”
The Rainbow Families submission includes the real experiences of the LGBTI community, with stories of families receiving homophobic letters and flyers, and hateful discriminatory messages on social media including comparisons to paedophiles and bestiality.
They said children were bullied at school because of the messages other children were receiving about LGBTI families.
Rainbow Families NSW is a volunteer-led organisation providing a support network to children and families in the LGBTI community.
It aims to build a community that fosters resiliency by connecting, supporting and empowering LGBTI families, and to address discrimination and other social disadvantages.
Our Community has been campaigning for years for Equality, including Marriage Equality. As we saw during the entire time of the Federal ALP Government from 2007-2013 – when, initially they had an 18-seat majority in the House of Representatives and with the backing of the Greens and others control of the Senate and after the First Rudd Debacle though they lost that 18-seat Majority they still had the numbers in both Houses of the Federal Parliament to amend the Australian Marriage Act. They did NOTHING. Julia Gillard said she was opposed to giving us our Rights. Bill Shorten, until the result of the Postal Vote became clear when he suddenly decided that it was all his and Penny Wong’s idea all the time, was very openly Opposed to giving us our Rights too.
Both the major parties, the ALP and Coalition had more than enough MPs and Senators to have defeated any proposal to change the ACT to allow us to marry. They would have done so and we would still not have the Right to Marry.
Like it, or loathe it, the only way around the impasse was to have this Postal Vote – we had already seen that, thanks to the ALP, the originally proposed Plebiscite was defeated. Turnbull, who has been very public in his support for the change, saw the only way to get around the Federal Parliament was to hold that Postal Vote.
It passed and, for once, our politicians did what we the Voters – GLBTIQ and others – had been asking them to do: To Change that damned Act and give us our Right to Marry.
Some have complained that the literature ( if it can be called that) was disturbing to their children. Wasn’t it the responsibility of their parents to make sure their children did not get to see and of the vilifying material shoved into their letterboxes? That is what both the Gay and Straight members of my extended family did.
Of course we “ended up in the frontline” of the Debate. That debate was all about Us. If we had done as the rednecks and bigots, the ultra-Right-Wing neo-fascists such as the supporters of One Nation and Bernardi’s Australian Conservatives and the Catholic Church wanted and remained silent during that time Turnbull’s Postal Vote would have been Defeated and we would still not have the Right to Marry. A situation which would have gone on for the foreseeable future.
We can’t have it all our own way.
It was Our Responsibility to ensure Our Children were protected from the nasty side of the debate.
That Postal Vote was the ONLY way for us to achieve Equality because the Federal Parliament would possibly never, ever have agreed to change the Australian Marriage Act without it.
Another partisan rant. Why blame Labor? Why did this issue have to be partisan at all? It wasn’t partisan in New Zealand or the UK, the two countries on this planet with the closest political and social structures to our own (although NZ no longer has a Westminster Parliament). It would have damaged the cause if as you keep suggesting it would have been better for marriage equality to have gone ahead despite the opposition of each and every Liberal and National MP.
As for Shorten, he voted YES in Parliament in 2012 for marriage equality. Sure Gillard and Rudd didn’t and you are correct to have a crack at them. Turnbull also voted against marriage equality in 2012 and the partisan nature of your comments when you forever refuse to criticise your buddy Malcolm screams volumes.
The fact is that Shorten is demonstrably better on this issue than Turnbull and no amount of pretending otherwise is going to change that.
There’s an amazing scene in the excellent film Mississippi Burning where one of the characters is recalling an incident from his childhood where his father committed a shameful act of racism. The father justified it, saying to his young son ‘If you ain’t better than a nigger, son, who are you better than?’
The whole plebiscite (or as it turned out “statistical survey” after the Greens, Labor and several crossbench Senators (Hinch, Xenephon groups) did the right thing and voted down the plebiscite) was a homophobic act. It was never about democracy, every pollster predicted the result months before it began and the No campaign had very little to say about the actual issue of marriage.
When decades from now Tony Abbott finally comes clean about his motivations for the No campaign, he’s going to justify it saying ‘If you ain’t better than a faggot, son, who are you better than?’
Old white guys only oppose civil rights for minorities for one reason – they can’t stand not being superior. As an increasingly old white guy myself I have to admit a lot of people in my demographic disgust me.