Australians vote/express positive survey response for marriage equality

[Arwon]

The last few months Australia has done this stupid postal survey/process on marriage equality because parliament couldn't do its job. Today we got the results back, a crushing win to the "yes" campaign:

The response rate/turnout was 79.5% which is pretty stonking for a voluntary postal vote thing which isn't even binding on the parliament. Majority "yes" in 133 of 150 electorates, majority in every state. Big result given how gross and dishonest the no campaigning was.

It's over to parliament to get it legislated now. There shouldn't be too much of a delay but who knows. The no campaigners (hopefully an irrelevant rump given the cross-party marriage equality bill likely to be passed) are going to use the legislation to roll back anti-discrimination law.

 

[Evie]

I'm sure the more socially backwards member of parliament will try and sabotage the result with daft bills.

Well, assuming they don't come up with a sudden case of Foreigncitizenshipitis. I hear there's an epidemic in Australia.

All that said, congratulation, Australia (the people, not the politicians). You've done your big sibling (that's Canada) proud .

 

[Arakhor]

You hear that, Britain? That's the will of the people.

 

[Arwon]

Yeah but we just needed a damn ordinary 1000 person opinion poll to know that

 

[Kyriakos]

I think it is a good result. That said, the title is somewhat misleading; why not call it "same-sex marriage"? "Marriage equality" could easily refer to equality between husband and wife.

 

[Arwon]

Marriage equality is the usual term here, when you have your own utterly needless non-binding vote/survey campaign to get your parliament to do its job you can call it whatever *you* want.

 

[Kyriakos]

Marriage equality is the usual term here, when you have your own utterly needless non-binding vote/survey campaign to get your parliament to do its job you can call it whatever *you* want.

Deal.

 

[Valka D'Ur]

I'm sure the more socially backwards member of parliament will try and sabotage the result with daft bills.

Well, assuming they don't come up with a sudden case of Foreigncitizenshipitis. I hear there's an epidemic in Australia.

All that said, congratulation, Australia (the people, not the politicians). You've done your big sibling (that's Canada) proud .

Of course we had the advantage of a PM who decided to go ahead and allow a same-sex marriage bill to be drafted, tabled, voted on, and he told off the Catholic bishops/archbishops who threatened to excommunicate him that he kept his religion as a private matter, not as something he brought with him to the House. A lot of people criticize Paul Martin for a lot of things (deservedly so in some cases), but if this is his only legacy as a former Prime Minister, it's a pretty good one.

 

[Synobun]

I've watched someone I know in Australia belly-ache about this for well over half a year through Facebook and forum posts.

They're having a complete meltdown about the "sodomites" right now.

Good.

 

[metatron]

The last few months Australia has done this stupid postal survey/process on marriage equality because parliament couldn't do its job. Today we got the results back, a crushing win to the "yes" campaign:

Big result given how gross and dishonest the no campaigning was.

Yeah but we just needed a damn ordinary 1000 person opinion poll to know that

Marriage equality is the usual term here, when you have your own utterly needless non-binding vote/survey campaign to get your parliament to do its job you can call it whatever *you* want.

You seem upset. Why?

As @Synsensa highlighted, isn't this mostly a several months long escapade of conservatives trying to hit their own foot with heavy objects to prove a point?
And now they may even be dumb enough to come back for seconds?

I'd take it.

 

[Synobun]

You seem upset. Why?

A common theme in the 'No' campaign was that this wasn't an issue of discrimination but an issue of 'law'. They were very insistent on this belief/claim regardless of how silly it is if you think it through for only just a moment.

 

[Arwon]

You seem upset. Why?

As @Synsensa highlighted, isn't this mostly a several months long escapade of conservatives trying to hit their own foot with heavy objects to prove a point?
And now they may even be dumb enough to come back for seconds?

I'd take it.

Having people have to campaign and beg the rest of the population to vote the right way on one's basic rights is gross and demeaning. The campaign was quite upsetting and stressful to a lot of people - the "no" mob were accusing gay people of being like the gestapo, causing a new "stolen generation" (a reference to the forced removal of indigenous kids from parents in the pursuit of what amounted to an attempted cultural genocide), being compared to pedophiles, all that sort of stuff was turbocharged due to the campaign. Demonisation of trans people also somehow became a significant focus of the TV campaign. It's crappy to put the queer community through all that.

It was all quite ugly and at the end of the day we're back where we started from - hoping parliament will do their bloody job. The Irish had to go through it due to their constitution and got a binding result, we had to go through it because of a factional dispute in the Liberal Party and ended up with something non-binding that gives a less accurate gauge of opinion than a sampled poll would.

 

[Ajidica]

Good on Australia.

 

[metatron]

Having people have to campaign and beg the rest of the population to vote the right way on one's basic rights is gross and demeaning. The campaign was quite upsetting and stressful to a lot of people - the "no" mob were accusing gay people of being like the gestapo, causing a new "stolen generation" (a reference to the forced removal of indigenous kids from parents in the pursuit of what amounted to an attempted cultural genocide), being compared to pedophiles, all that sort of stuff was turbocharged due to the campaign. Demonisation of trans people also somehow became a significant focus of the TV campaign. It's crappy to put the queer community through all that.

It was all quite ugly and at the end of the day we're back where we started from - hoping parliament will do their bloody job. The Irish had to go through it due to their constitution and got a binding result, we had to go through it because of a factional dispute in the Liberal Party and ended up with something non-binding that gives a less accurate gauge of opinion than a sampled poll would.

Well, what is the alternative you were wishing for, exactly?
That conservatives were magically not homophobes even though you knew they were?
Or that they tactically - anticipating defeat - hide their homophobia and channel it bit by bit in all sorts of other... activity?

 

[ThERat]

Great outcome. With such high participation in the poll, it must be a stomach churner for the hypo crypts! Lovely.

 

[Arwon]

Well, what is the alternative you were wishing for, exactly?
That conservatives were magically not homophobes even though you knew they were?
Or that they tactically - anticipating defeat - hide their homophobia and channel it bit by bit in all sorts of other... activity?

Parliament legislating to amend Marriage Act 1961 to say marriage is between two people rather than a man and a woman.

A parliamentary vote would have passed any time in the last couple of years, but the Prime Minister and his cabinet refused to allow a vote to be held because of the conservative faction of the Liberals threatening his job. It's good that we won (well, it's good that the survey found a majority), but people should never have been subjected to this in the first place.

 

[Berzerker]

well there's irony, the gays were being compared to Roy Moore?

I cant imagine they appreciated that association

 

[Camikaze]

The electorate by electorate results are really interesting, and give a great insight into the dimensionality of Australia's political divides. A lot of the 'no' areas are really strong Labor areas, and a lot of the 'yes' areas are really strong Liberal Party (i.e. conservative) areas.

But the 'no' vote takes two forms. One is high migration areas, like Blaxland, which I believe has the highest Muslim population in Australia (about 30% of the electorate). These areas are heavy Labor areas which are not at risk of swinging to the Liberal Party. The other is white working class voters, who have also traditionally been Labor voters, but who are much more amenable to voting for the Liberal Party. My electorate, for instance, is a 'no' electorate, and also a reasonably marginal Liberal electorate. But it's a traditionally working class electorate which was safely in Labor's hands before 2010.

So there's a strong contrast between the cosmopolitan, inner-city type constituency that someone like Tanya Plibersek is representing, and the constituency that her colleague Chris Bowen is representing.

Similarly in the Liberal party, there's a divide between the social and economic conservatives. Malcolm Turnbull supports marriage equality, and Tony Abbott does not. But they both represent North Sydney blue ribbon electorates which voted overwhelmingly 'yes'. Malcolm Turnbull is very much a good fit for his electorate in this regard, but Tony Abbott is not. He has been primarily appealing to the Western Sydney working class social conservative type, in a kinda Trumpian way, but those aren't the people making up his electorate.

Well, what is the alternative you were wishing for, exactly?
That conservatives were magically not homophobes even though you knew they were?
Or that they tactically - anticipating defeat - hide their homophobia and channel it bit by bit in all sorts of other... activity?

Yes, it would probably be too much to expect homophobes to not be, but firstly, that does not make their homophobia any less indefensible, and secondly, that's not so much the issue. There were enough parliamentarians to amend the Marriage Act, and the postal survey was simply a device by the Turnbull government to deal with their own internal problems. Turnbull is under pressure from the conservative wing of the party, given his poor performance in the polls, and so believed that he could not afford to allow a free vote on the issue. So to preserve his own personal position within the party, he caved to the demands of the conservatives to put it to a public vote (these demands being made as a last ditch defence hoping for the emergence of some sort of silent majority). The parliament rejected an official plebiscite, because it's a waste of money and a pretty offensive concept. So Turnbull forged ahead with the voluntary, non-binding postal survey. This avoided the need for legislation, as it could rely on some pretty dubious executive action, which although determined to be legal by the High Court, was a clear stretch to dip into 'emergency funds'. A lot of the conservatives demanding the vote promptly announced, of course, that they would ignore a 'yes' vote in any case.

 

[Arwon]

The Yes campaign actually made a deliberate decision not to focus on changing minds in heavily Non-English Speaking Background areas but instead to run a Get Out The Vote effort locking in their poll-identified existing majority. The No guys campaigned hard in NESB communities. I think part of the No majority in Western Sydney is explained by this conscious campaign strategy - response/turnout was markedly lower in those seats.

Incidentally just to be clear, as well as Muslims we're talking other NESB Australians too. In Blaxland's case as well as some conservative white folk there's a lot of ethnic Chinese, Vietnamese, and a lot of numerically smaller groups. McMahon, the third-highest No vote seat, is only 12% Muslim but 60% Christian, and only 8% Anglican meaning the other 52% fare other Christians. Among the 36% Catholics would be a lot of non-Anglo Catholics (eg Vietnamese and Middle Eastern) and there's also a surprising number of Christian Middle Eastern minority church groups like Assyrians and Eastern Orthodox (4% of the electorate speaks Assyrian Neo-Aramaic).

The other part is that, unlike in Melbourne, the strongly NESB areas more greatly overlap with conservative low-income anglos and even some outright bible belty areas (eg the Hills District).

I don't think a lot of the "no" vote from the NESB community will be particularly strongly held. It won't influence votes, for instance. I think a lot is more a fairly reflexive response to something they don't get exposed to and which isn't an issue in their communities. Think about where much of Europe, North America, Latin America or Australia were twenty years ago. Mainstream western society has totally changed its mind about homosexuality and marriage equality over the last 20 years in these parts of the world, it happened really rapidly through millions of individual incidents of contact, reconsideration, etc. It took open exposure and discussion.

There'd be far less of that happening for relatively recent migrants - pretty much unless you have family or coworkers who are open with you, you might not ever have to think much about queer issues. You see plenty of beautiful stories like this from a Laotian dude, but not everyone has a gay kid to change their views...

 

[Kyriakos]

I think it is fine to have official same-sex couple marriage. An issue is regarding any state perks meant for bearing children. Obviously that isn't mentioned as a deterrent regarding allowing same-sex marriage; it is about legal and money-similar tied benefits for officially married same-sex people.
A more important issue - non monetary- imo is rules re adoption by same-sex couples. This deserves some research, not really due to actual same-sex couples but due to the (largely not known) role that the existence of same-sex parents may have on the adopted kid (or the kid borne out of one partner, but not biologically tied to the other, and factoring the same-sex marriage as well). Eg it is pretty foolish to take for granted than a kid will just react in the same way an educated and generally polite/friendly adult would, or that any bad effect will be due to specific actions of the same-sex couple and not the same-sex situation itself. It is a shady area deserving thorough research.