By the time the chief statistician took to a Canberra podium on November 15, 2017, to drily announce the result of the same-sex marriage postal survey, Australians had long since decided gay people should be able to wed.
The grave “consequences” opponents of same-sex marriage warned of during the 2017 campaign may not have come to fruition. “No one has married the Sydney Harbour Bridge,” Brown observes.Credit:Labor’s Penny Wong – another key figure in this episode of Australian history – says: “The sky didn’t fall in. Instead, our country today is a fairer and more equal place.”
Then prime minister Malcolm Turnbull, a long-time marriage equality supporter, counts the law reform among his top achievements, and does not accept it could have been done any other way. Turnbull says he always believed the Parliament should have legislated marriage equality in a free conscience vote, but it was Tony Abbott who hamstrung the party with his promise of a plebiscite.“I warned Abbott about this, as described in my book – that once he offered people a vote on it, it was impossible to take that away. We were stuck with it,” Turnbull says. “The only way we could get this done is the way we did.
– that “while [Dutton] undoubtedly comes from the right wing of the Liberal Party, he is strategic, not ideological; a pragmatist, not a zealot”.Many LGBTQ people have not forgiven Turnbull and the Coalition for inflicting that campaign on them – a campaign that brought about a public debate on their worth, dignity and equality.This was accentuated by the extraneous issues brought into the postal survey campaign.
The fear that equal marriage would erode religious freedom led to a review into that topic led by former Liberal attorney-general Philip Ruddock. Its recommendations – especially those around reforms to the anti-discrimination exemptions enjoyed by religious schools – proved even more troublesome for politicians than gay marriage itself.
Advocates also hope for law reform to end conversion or suppression practices nationwide, and to remove barriers to trans and gender-diverse people who want to amend their birth certificates and other forms of identification.