Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the Marriage Amendment (Definition and Religious Freedoms) Bill 2017. This is a cause which I have long supported and I am gratified and proud in so doing, now to find myself in company with the overwhelming majority of the Australian people. I rise to support this bill because I am a Liberal, and liberalism stands for freedom: for every freedom consistent with the equal freedom of one's fellow citizens; for every freedom consistent alike with the good of the individual and the general good of society; for every freedom that emerges from and sustains the inherent dignity of humanity. I support this bill because it establishes a new freedom of precisely such a kind, yet one that has been denied too long, too cruelly and too often with such meagre and patently disingenuous defences.

It should be the equal right of gay men and women, in common with their fellow countrymen, to shoulder in full the responsibilities and enjoy in full the privileges that are attached to the institution of civil marriage. That means more than one merely creating under a different name some second-rate, technical, de facto correspondence between the rights of gay couples and the rights of their heterosexual counterparts. Equality means equality. Their commitment is no less deep, their fidelity no less enduring, their love no less worthy of the rituals of official recognition and public acceptance that have become the familiar hallmarks of the marriage ceremony as we know it. To accord them a different status is to accord them a lesser status and in reality to perpetuate the shameful history of discrimination and humiliation against which gay and lesbian Australians have had to struggle so long and so bitterly.

There are other reasons I support this bill. I do so because, like former British Prime Minister David Cameron, I realise, as I think all on the conservative side of politics should realise, that marriage equality is something that should be supported not in spite of being conservative, but because it is the conservative thing to do. Conservatism should not be the enemy of change. The spirit of true conservatism is about keeping what is best in our institutions and improving what is not. Marriage is rightly at the heart of our social system. It is the institution most conducive to the happiness of family life and with it the stability of community life. That is not simply because it creates a stable framework in which to raise children, vitally important though that might be, but also because men and women, all of us, by our nature crave love, compassion, support and understanding—all of those things which find their highest expression in the marriage bond.

I do not pretend, of course, that all marriages are successful, but all successful marriages are a boon to society and we do our society harm by withholding the blessings of marriage from a whole section of the community who are just as qualified and more than willing to embrace its responsibilities and share in its benefits. There are now 45,000 households in Australia with children of same-sex couples whom this law will enfranchise in a way that expunges forever the enforced shame of second-class status that has so far been their lot. That is progress and that is improvement—improvement of a kind that brings new vigour and new relevance to one of our most revered institutions.

I want to say something about religion because I am an observant Catholic, and it is because of my religion and not in spite of it that I support this bill. The separation of church and state is the foundation of our civil order. It is enshrined in section 116 of our Constitution, which precludes the Commonwealth from making laws for establishing any religion, imposing any religious observance or prohibiting the free exercise of any religion. The protection of the free exercise of religion is an important part of that principle and accordingly finds expression in the amendments proposed in the bill to section 47 and the insertion of proposed sections 47A, 47B and 71A of the Marriage Act 1961. These permit religious marriage celebrants and religious organisations to decline to participate in a marriage which does not conform to their religious tenets, which is only fair and reasonable. But it is not and never was necessary for the protection of religious freedom to disallow same-sex marriage altogether.

I am satisfied that these changes protect religious freedom in this country. I do not support the insertion of unnecessary amendments. As a matter of principle, acts of parliament should not contain superfluous clauses, especially superfluous clauses based on the opinion that Australia's laws don't adequately protect the religious freedoms that we have cherished since Federation. I firmly believe that they do. It would be a betrayal of the separation of church and state to deny the equal right of all citizens to contract civil marriage simply because of the sacramental restrictions that apply to holy matrimony. It would also be hypocritical. We do not deny civil marriage to infertile couples or divorcees, even though these too are traditional impediments to Christian marriage. That is because it is plainly wrong for the law of the state to disqualify citizens from secular rights by reference to religious laws, let alone the laws of a religion which those citizens may not even profess.

Nevertheless, we do well to remember that in Australia, as in all Western democracies, the legacy of Christian ethics lies at the heart of our polity and that the church has contributed immeasurably over the centuries to the historical development of our way of thinking as a community. So too the nobler instincts of religion—justice, charity, forbearance and love—continue to inform our culture and indeed underpin the very reasons we as a community instinctively deplore injustice, discrimination and prejudice. Yet religious tenets must never become in themselves the prescriptive basis of our lawmaking. That way lies oppression. Reason, fair dealing and even-handedness must always remain the yardstick of our secular laws, but reason is not to be thought, on that account, the enemy of faith. Reason too is a gift from God and can illumine our shortcomings as articulately as the voice of conscience. Reason, let it be said, commends this bill.

I am fortified in this regard by the recently stated views of the rectors of the Jesuit colleges of Riverview in Sydney and Xavier in Melbourne, sister colleges of my own St Ignatius Adelaide, that the achievement of this legislation is consistent with the gospel of Christ. So let it not be thought that there is nothing the church can learn from the world—a world which, after all, she raised in its infancy. Chief amongst those lessons from which the church might most profit is the warning not to mistake immutability for truth or intransigence for virtue, for reason alone, unclouded by superstition, tells us that homosexuality is no more abnormal than left-handedness, that sexual orientation is innate and not conditioned, and that the expression of love between two men or between two women is not to be stigmatised because of the words of an ancient text or the prejudices of an unscientific age. Too many young people have taken their lives or had them taken from them because of the words of an ancient text. Nor is same-sex attraction a disorder to be reversed, much less an illness to be cured, and much less a vice to be brutalised by punishment.

So it behoves us in this place to ensure that these same tired and destructive prejudices, which have wrought enough wretchedness and suffering in their time, should not be permitted to continue to disenfranchise any Australian from participating in the one institution of society by which our laws respond to our greatest virtue by taking love and enhancing it with the social status it inherently deserves. To all gay and lesbian Australians, but especially to all those young men and women who have struggled with their sexual orientation in the confines of a once unsympathetic culture, I say: here is a law to challenge and in time to bring an end to all the unthinking denigration and casual condescension that they once routinely had to endure and which many, tragically, could not endure. And it will be brought to an end—of that I am certain—because, in concert with the peoples of the civilised world, it is now overwhelmingly the expressed will of the Australian people that it be brought to an end. I commend the bill to the House.

See this speech in context