On Tuesday, Malcolm Turnbull stood up in Parliament and told 11-year-old Eddie that “as he gets older” he’ll understand why the Government wants to fund a $7.5 million campaign so people Eddie has never met can judge his family.
But Eddie already understood – far better than the Prime Minister – what that campaign would mean for families like his.
Eddie chose to come to Canberra on Tuesday to ask Malcolm Turnbull to “please do your job.” He wants his mums to be able to get married without having to hear in the playground that there’s something wrong with his family.
When Eddie came into my office on Tuesday morning with other kids from Rainbow Families, a support group for LGBTQI families, it really struck me that he had a point.
Why should people who barely know him make assumptions about his family and have a vote on how they can live?
No-one got to vote on whether I should be allowed to marry my husband.
Our views on marriage and families in Australia have changed over time. Years ago, the government could determine who Aboriginal Australians could marry. In most states, Aboriginal Australians were not allowed to marry their non-Aboriginal partners.
As late as 1959, the Darwin protector of Aborigines refused Gladys Namagu permission to marry her white fiancé, Mick Daly.
In his speech at The Ethics Centre earlier this year, Indigenous journalist Stan Grant spoke of the dispossession of his people. Of the Constitution that had "allowed for laws to be made that would take our children, that would invade our privacy, that would tell us who we could marry and tell us where we could live."
Listen to Mia Freedman, Kate de Brito and Monique Bowley discuss the plebiscite on Mamamia Outloud.
Australian soldiers who fought overseas in WW2 and fell in love with a Japanese woman were not allowed to marry her or to return to Australia if they did, until the law was changed in 1952.
No-one would think it appropriate today that the government could deny a marriage because of race.
My mother-in-law was forbidden from marrying her first love because she was Catholic and he was Protestant – that seems absurd and cruel to us today.
Fifty years ago, if you had asked people, they would have said a mother’s place was in the home. Working mothers like me, away from home a lot, would likely have been thought by many not fit to be mothers.
Single mothers and women living in de facto relationships often had their children removed. Some children were taken from their families just because their parents were too poor to look after them. Thousands of Indigenous children were removed.
We assumed children would be better off in institutions than growing up in a family structure that didn’t fit the ideal at the time.
We have offered unreserved apologies to those parents and the children taken from them.
Families come in all different shapes and sizes. What matters is the love and care in that family.
We already know the majority of Australians support marriage equality.
It’s time for the Parliament to make marriage equality a reality – it could be done next sitting week, without a damaging and divisive $170 million plebiscite.
Top Comments
Glad to see a child who WILL be directly affected by this bigotry present to show some reality to these backwards toads. I'm gay & a small business owner. My two children are both fantastic students, volunteers, & people. We are NOT 2nd-class-- & withholding my right to marry my partner is saying EXACTLY that! I have no idea why anyone thinks EQUALITY means anything except it's ONLY definition: Equal, under the law.
If Howard managed to graft that hateful bit of discriminatory poison to the marriage act, without a plebiscite, then we can bloody well "incise & remove" it w/o one now! Put that money back into education classes for the Liberal gov't on how to treat ALL Australians fairly & decently.
I want all the backward toads to show me the proper respect?
I want all of the backwards toads to show EQUAL respect & to support EQUAL status to ALL Aussies.
EQUALITY only has ONE definition.
Clear now?
Why is everyone using this to bash labor for not supporting reform in 2012. Yes it would have been preferable if they had supported marriage equality under either Rudd or Gillard. And at the there was a lot of surprise and outrage that Julia Gillard stood against reform. Even better they could have blocked the 2004 amendment, which Mark Latham has said he regrets not doing. But that's by the by. Labor's current platform is to support reform and to oppose the plebiscite. Labor took opposing the plebiscite to an election and won if voting with the crossbench enough seats in the Senate to block the bill. And there are good reasons too - it's $160 million on a formality that doesn't have any legal status in Australia's constitutional system of government. As for the Liberals supposed "mandate." So what. The Liberals, like Labor, have walked away from election promises before without controversy - They just walked away from a superannuation policy they took to the election, AT THE BEHEST OF THEIR OWN BACKBENCH. It seems conservatives are only concerned about election promises when they can use them to bash minorities or when it's necessary to protect their dear friends in the mining industry from taxes they don't wish to pay.
So bottom line, she is still a hypocrite who manipulates kids in the media for her own ends.
Your post reads you more care that it's Labor instead of it Labor really cares.
This article was written by a Labor politician, so of course there are going to be political comments.
I don't think noticing blatant hypocrisy based on past actions or being aware of political manipulation is quite the same as bashing.