Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I present the final report of the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee's inquiry on the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill 2010, together with the Hansard record of proceedings and documents presented to the committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

by leave: I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

I stand here very proudly as the Chair of the Senate's Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee tabling this report on Senator Hanson-Young's marriage equality bill. This is not a complicated piece of work, by any means, that this committee has undertaken for many years. So it is not difficult and it is not complicated. The issues are not particularly difficult or complicated either but it is certainly an inquiry which has generated national attention, a lot of emotion and has produced for us a tremendous amount of work inside the committee.

I will spend a minute elaborating on that. This inquiry received 79,200 submissions—unprecedented in the history of this parliament. I want to defend it and also place on record my enormous appreciation of and understanding of the workload that that has generated for the committee staff, particularly our secretary, Julie Dennett, and Ann Palmer, who were the two lead people assisting this inquiry by the committee. Seventy-nine thousand two hundred submissions means that whether it was one page, whether it was an email or whether it was a complicated submission from an organisation that went to hundreds of pages, they were all dealt in exactly the same way. They were all handled, registered and entered on a database in each and every same way. They were treated equally by the committee staff and by the committee.

What people are focused on is the arguments in favour of marriage equality and those against. At the end of the day, 46,400 submissions or 59 per cent were in favour of changing the Marriage Act and 32,800 or 41 per cent were not in favour of changing the Marriage Act. I also want to make it abundantly clear that the committee meets and determines for itself the way in which it conducts the inquiry. We determine whether we have public hearings, who we hear from, and, in a democratic way, what submissions will be published and what will not. We made a decision as a committee that we would publish 360 submissions. Of those 125 were from organisations, 116 were from individuals in favour of changing the act, 116 were from individuals not in favour of changing the act and three took a neutral position. The other submissions are on a database that we have kept and stored. Most of them were form letters, many of them were one-liners and many of them were only a couple of paragraphs. Most of them were short and general statements. So I want to make it clear that all submissions were treated equally and the committee determined itself how we conducted the inquiry.

What did we find out and what did we recommend? This will be a defining day in the social fabric and the history of the nation when it comes to equality for same-sex couples. My committee has strongly recommended that we as a parliament should support the Marriage Equality Amendment Bill.