Page 1756 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Members of our community will also be holding a protest this Saturday, which I will attend and speak at. Will Mr Barr and Mr Corbell be as popular at this rally as they were at earlier, more optimistic ones?
I was hoping to put forward a motion yesterday calling on the ACT government to not give up the fight and to extract from the Civil Partnerships Bill those aspects that relate to the legal recognition of ceremonies and present it in a second bill. Unfortunately, I could not put forward that motion as it pre-empted today’s business and would have been out of order. Being a single member in a budget week, my office has not had the resources to do up the amendments but I do intend to table amendments in coming sitting weeks.
If the Greens’ idea was followed, the first of the two bills would be exactly what we have here in front of us, legislating for the recognition of a relationship between two people, regardless of gender. This bill would meet the federal government’s concerns, be passed by the Assembly today, without disallowance by the federal government, and would provide for civil partnerships to occur in the ACT as soon as later this month.
But the second bill would provide for the legal recognition of ceremonial aspects of civil partnership and, if the federal government chose to disallow this legislation, the plight of civil partnerships would not be put entirely at risk. In addition, by forcing the federal government to disallow the legislation, the ACT government could force, with assistance from Greens senators and federal Labor, to have a publicly documented debate on the matter via the Senate.
But the path that the ACT has chosen does not push the federal Labor government to explain itself, as the previous federal Liberal government was pushed. Prime Minister Rudd should be forced to say why he has suddenly done an about-turn on the matter of civil partnerships. Late last year he said he would not interfere. What caused the change?
Perhaps the Rudd government has found it politically expedient to form a compromise with the Australian Christian Lobby and groups such as Family First. And there are others, as we know. There are not too many of them, but they have loud voices. The compromise could be that these conservative Christian groups will remain silent during federal Labor’s removal of discriminatory clauses from commonwealth legislation, if Labor is willing to overturn ceremonial aspects of the ACT civil partnerships legislation. Perhaps Mr Stanhope knows; perhaps Mr Corbell knows. I would like to know.
ACT constituents are thus the pawns of Mr Rudd’s trade-off, and it appears that the ACT government is going to let this happen. I am not totally sure why the ACT government ultimately chose to scale back its fight for same-sex couples’ rights. It could be because both governments are Labor and the ACT does not want to fully combat its federal counterparts, the ACT government just wants to hurry up and see civil partnerships legally recognised, or the federal government has provided our ACT with no choice. The answer, I suspect, is a mixture of all three.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .