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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 3 Hansard (11 March) . . Page.. 843 ..

In the Compensation (Fatal Injuries) Act, same-sex partners are not entitled to the recognition or compensation that a bereaved partner in a different-sex de facto relationship would be.

ACT law does not prevent single or lesbian women from accessing IVF. However, a woman who is a partner of an IVF mother would not automatically be recognised as a parent to her partner's child, when a man in a similar situation who is not genetically related to that child would. Same-sex couples are not allowed to adopt children.

These are important issues. I appreciate that some people in our community and perhaps some people in this place will find this legislation difficult to accept. In part, that is why community input is particularly important. Of course, it is important in its own right in identifying the problems.

There will be some who will never agree because of their particular religious views or a particularly intolerant attitude or fear of difference. Those attitudes and fear of their effects at the ballot box should not stop us from removing discriminatory laws.

Mr Smyth said that the gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and intersex group were lobbying, and then there was the rest of our community. That is quite an interesting thing to reflect on. It is as if there were this lobby group promoting reform of our law, and then there were the rest. It is not like that. That is fundamental to the problem we are addressing here.

I have done a lot of work in committees on how societal attitudes impact on people whose sexuality is not heterosexual or whose gender is not clear. It is heartbreaking to see what happens to people in our community who are not heterosexual. It is heartbreaking to see what happens to children and young people who are in an emerging sexuality stage of their life and have to deal with hate in our schools. You wonder why children feel hate. Where is it coming from? Obviously, it is coming from the society they live in. It is coming from their families or their peer group.

This issue has never been addressed properly in this place by Liberal governments in the past or by this government. It is something I want to raise again with the new minister for education. We need a proactive approach to this issue in our schools. The research is there. It is not as if we did not know that it takes a very heavy toll on young people.

I remind members-I know I have spoken about this before-of the report from John Howard and Jonathan Nicholas in 1999, Better to be dead than gay?. That showed that gay-identified males were 3.7 times more likely to report making a suicide attempt and that the fundamental issues for young people were about non-acceptance, about not feeling they belong anywhere in our society. They are rejected by society. That is the cruellest thing any human being can feel, so we should not be surprised that they are more likely to try to end their lives.

What we are debating today is not about our social responses. It is not about how we deal with this in schools or how we deal with this as a community and a society. It is about law. It is about removing from law discrimination against people who are not heterosexual.

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