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Our position, and the position the LGBTI community wants us to advocate, is very simple: no plebiscite\u00a0under any circumstances<\/em>, just a free vote.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
THERE has been no progress on marriage equality in Australia since long before former Prime Minister\u00a0Tony Abbott tricked his moderate frontbenchers into a marathon joint party room meeting<\/a> with the hard-right National\u00a0Party\u00a0in August 2015 and gave Australia a new word to debate at dinner parties.<\/p>\n
Abbott got the idea about a public vote on same-sex marriage\u00a0from his Independent nemeses Tony Windsor and Rob Oakshott, who first\u00a0uttered the P-Word during Julia Gillard\u2019s prime ministership<\/a>.<\/p>\n
\u201cIt would lower the temperature of the political debate and would provide some back-up support to any politician who takes this thing on in future,\u201d Oakshott said.<\/p>\n
Despite voting against marriage for same-sex couples in parliament, Windsor started wavering in favour of relationship equality after attending a same-sex civil union. \u201cIf it came down to my vote [in Parliament] I’d have to have a really hard think about it. But that ceremony had an impact on me. I’d probably vote for it,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n
Yet\u00a0he plumped for a public vote instead of\u00a0just wielding\u00a0his parliamentary power, a move which has set the tone for the conservative approach to marriage equality in this country ever since: why deal with the pesky issue of allowing gays to marry when it can be handed over to the people?<\/p>\n
Even the Greens were up\u00a0for a referendum in 2013, with Christine Milne wanting to take the debate away from former Prime Minister Julia Gillard and then opposition leader Abbott, labelling\u00a0them both \u201con the wrong side of history\u201d.<\/span><\/p>\n
But what happened to the marriage equality plebiscite in the Senate late on November 7, 2016, is a \u2018David and Goliath\u2019 tale of how Australian LGBTI found our\u00a0voice.<\/span><\/p>\n
Ask the people<\/h5>\n
Abbott and the hard right must have rubbed their hands together on the night of August 11, 2015. With this strange-sounding, hard-to-spell\u00a0latin word – plebiscite – they\u2019d well and truly snookered marriage equality advocates and lobbyists with a matching slogan that would appeal to the lowest common denominator: \u201cAsk the people,\u201d usually thrown\u00a0with a nifty kicker: \u201cWhat are you afraid of?\u201d.<\/p>\n
Australia hadn’t experienced a plebiscite in more than a generation. The last came in 1974 under Gough Whitlam, and it asked Australian voters about our preferred national anthem. We\u00a0selected ‘Advance Australia Fair’ over ‘God Save The Queen’, but Malcolm\u00a0Fraser ignored what the people said and reinstated the old song. It wasn’t until Bob Hawke altered the song sheet for good in 1984 that our voice was respected by parliament.<\/p>\n
But Abbott was pleased enough about his plan that he\u00a0took his eye off key supporters, including Christopher Pyne, whose rage at being tied to the homophobic hard-right of the National Party<\/a>\u00a0was the last straw, and saw them oust the Prime Minister by September that year.<\/p>\n
The cheers within many LGBTI households were loud the\u00a0night Abbott was dumped, but just as many warned about the chance of betrayal. We\u2019d been duped before by Julia Gillard, who\u2019d presented as progressive but soon adopted an anti-equality mantra, and Turnbull disappointingly followed suit. His mantra was intoned differently, dictated by the National Party from the moment the new PM signed the nation\u2019s most secret power pact<\/a> – the Liberal Party-Coalition agreement. Clearly, a\u00a0plebiscite was to be the only way forward under this regime.<\/p>\n
There was very little detail about how a plebiscite would be managed, and the Coalition was painfully shy\u00a0about giving it.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n
What are you afraid of?<\/b><\/h5>\n
The question was so powerful it spread its tendrils throughout the Australian LGBTI community. A public vote sounded good. It sounded fair. Objections were hard to come up with once it had been embedded in the Liberal Party\u2019s suite of election promises.<\/p>\n
Only marriage equality lobbyists, it seemed, witnessed the way the rhetoric changed throughout the lengthy election campaign<\/a>. In the final week, marriage equality barely left the news cycle, the plebiscite positioned as some progressive torch lit by true believers.\u00a0But many of us asked how on earth a policy championed by Tony Abbott, dreamed up in rural heartlands by conservative thinkers, could be in any way beneficial to LGBTI?<\/p>\n
Rodney Croome.<\/p><\/div>\n
The problem was there was very little detail about how a plebiscite would be managed, and the Coalition was painfully shy\u00a0about giving it, which generated credible reports that the Coalition might well make the outcome non-binding and require a majority of electorates to pass. The pressure was enough for Turnbull to come clean<\/a> before the ballot:\u00a0Coalition MPs could snub their noses at any\u00a0plebiscite outcomes.<\/p>\n
After the election, the diverse Senate and the return of Pauline Hanson<\/a> captured most of the media\u2019s attention. During the fallout, one of the highest-profile marriage equality activists in the county resigned from the organisation he\u2019d created in 2004.<\/p>\n
Rodney Croome\u2019s move away from Australian Marriage Equality<\/a> (AME) called to mind Ivan Hinton-Teoh\u2019s in April<\/a>. Croome\u2019s explicitly anti-plebiscite stance sounded an alarm bell. Hinton-Teoh\u00a0(who with his husband Chris was\u00a0one of the first same-sex couples to wed in the ACT\u00a0before the High Court quashed the law that allowed it) had started a new group just.equal<\/a>.<\/p>\n
Over its first\u00a0decade, AME\u00a0had become the peak marriage equality advocacy group in the country, so there was some explaining to do. Doug Pollard at The Stirrer<\/em> managed to get AME’s Alex Greenwich (Independent NSW MP), on the record<\/a>\u00a0answering serious questions about why the group\u00a0had not campaigned harder against Turnbull\u2019s plebiscite during the election; but the marriage equality waters were muddied, and there weren’t too many clear answers to be found anywhere.<\/p>\n
Plebiscite or nothing<\/h5>\n
The mantra from within the Coalition quickly evolved.\u00a0It was now ‘accept the plebiscite or wait indefinitely’. On a sunny Sunday afternoon working the Brisbane Markets with my husband, Richard and I\u00a0talked through what was at stake and agreed: if it came to a choice, we were prepared to wait for our New Zealand civil union to be recognised in our home country.<\/p>\n
We also knew what it was to knock on doors asking for our human rights, having petitioned our region to gauge the mood. Our results showed the electorate of Bowman in South East Queensland was overwhelmingly behind marriage equality, but the process was painful. The question brought out the first homophobia either of us had been exposed to in more than a decade.<\/p>\n
As we shared our story, friends in the lobby networks started to come out on the same page: the plebiscite was a great risk to mental health, and there was a sense that had AME\u00a0campaigned harder against it during the election, Turnbull may not have won. We all reminded ourselves that Doug Pollard had\u00a0called on AME to change its ways<\/a> within a week of the election, even as Turnbull\u2019s victory hung in the balance and everyone was speculating about the formation of the new Senate, which would stand as the last line of defence against the plebiscite.<\/p>\n
Suddenly, things came\u00a0into much sharper focus.<\/p>\n
Just.equal was already\u00a0match fit and spearheaded the push\u00a0against plebiscite-or-nothing thinking, with Shelley Argent, national spokesperson for PFLAG<\/a> (Parents and Friends of Lesbians and Gays)\u00a0and Croome.\u00a0A poll\u00a0was commissioned showing\u00a0the true picture of support for a plebiscite<\/a>, which had dropped to less than half of Australians\u00a0when respondents were informed of the $160-million cost and the non-binding nature of the outcome. Another showed the overwhelming majority of Australian LGBTI would be prepared to wait<\/a> for a parliamentary vote, not a public one.<\/p>\n
Shelley Argent.<\/p><\/div>\n
Several Coalition MPs relied on the positive outcome of the Irish marriage equality referendum, using mantras like \u2018dancing in the streets\u2019 and \u2018bringing the nation together\u2019. This was quickly countered by a study showing a different\u00a0picture of the negative Irish experience<\/a>.<\/p>\n
The message was clear: the majority of people who would\u00a0be impacted by marriage equality in Australia – that is, the LGBTI community – were\u00a0prepared to wait for a parliamentary free vote on our human rights. We demanded the Parliament ditch the plebiscite.<\/p>\n
Under any circumstances<\/h5>\n
AME and its new arm\u00a0Australians For Equality (A4E)\u00a0adopted strong\u00a0anti-plebiscite language in response, and called for the nation’s LGBTI activist and advocacy groups to unite, but the devil was\u00a0in the detail.<\/p>\n
Once again it was Doug Pollard who covered the story<\/a>: even though the majority of Australian LGBTI activist and advocacy groups were opposed to the plebiscite with AME and A4E, a smaller collective –\u00a0just.equal, Shelley Argent, Rodney Croome and Rainbow Families (Victoria) – wanted to add three simple words\u00a0to the\u00a0anti-plebiscite declaration.<\/p>\n
\u201cOur position, and the position the LGBTI community wants us to advocate, is very simple: no plebiscite under any circumstances<\/em>, just a free vote,\u201d a statement issued by just.equal revealed.<\/p>\n
Shove it<\/h5>\n
Miranda Devine can always be relied on to capture the moment. She went out early and hard<\/a> and told the LGBTI community to take the \u201colive branch\u201d offered by conservatives\u00a0and \u201cshove it where the sun don\u2019t shine\u201d. Classy dame, Miranda, but her vitriol, and where it was specifically aimed,\u00a0showed\u00a0savvy pundits knew the plebiscite was in its death throes,\u00a0attacked\u00a0not by Bill Shorten and Labor (the preferred chief suspects of the Coalition), but by us, the majority of the nation\u2019s LGBTI community.<\/p>\n
Rodney Croome\u00a0recaptured the moment from Ms Devine<\/a>: \u201cFor the first time at a federal level the voice of the LGBTI community has been the leading voice on an issue that affects us more than anyone else. For the first time our mental health in the face of prejudice and hate has been a primary consideration for many law makers.\u00a0For the first time we are seen not as an issue but as people.\u201d<\/p>\n
The Liberals tried reviving the plebiscite\u00a0with a compromise deal offered by Warren Entsch – an electronic online poll with a lower price tag<\/a>. But while he remains a great supporter of marriage equality and has done much to raise awareness about the issue in the Liberal Party, Entsch still struggles with the reality that any vote that is not binding on Parliament is a dodo.<\/p>\n
Turnbull and his team bravely flew the rainbow flag all the way from the House of Representatives to the Senate vote, repeating every\u00a0old myth and mantra on the way; but after a short life, this unnecessary, expensive, divisive shit of a policy has been slain.<\/p>\n
The Prime Minister\u00a0can hardly be\u00a0disappointed, since he was opposed to a public vote on human rights\u00a0before he shoved Tony Abbott out of the top job, and today’s\u00a0Senate\u00a0vote rids the Upper House of even more residual Abbott stink.<\/p>\n
Plan B<\/h5>\n
Ignore the naysayers, there is one. Head over to just.equal<\/a> and get up to speed… they’re the ones who’ve really<\/em> got plebiscite blood on their hands.<\/p>\n
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