George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

) ( ): On Wednesday, 2 August 1972, Mr Murray Hill, a Liberal member of the South Australian Legislative Council, rose to move the second reading of the Criminal Law Consolidation Act Amendment Bill. The effect of the bill was to provide that homosexual acts between consenting adult males should no longer be offences under the criminal law. The bill passed the Legislative Council. A few weeks later it was moved by the member for Bragg, Dr David Tonkin, in the House of Assembly, where it also passed. I never met Murray Hill, although most of us know his son, Robert Hill, the longest-serving leader of the Liberal Party in the Senate. Dr Tonkin would go on to become a Liberal Premier of South Australia.

Murray Hill's bill was the first step taken in any Australian parliament to reform the laws discriminating against homosexual people. The word 'gay' had not entered the vocabulary at that time—at least not in the sense that we use it today. In the quarter-century that followed, all of the states and territories, under governments of both political persuasions, followed suit. The last was Tasmania, where private consensual homosexual acts continued to be a crime until as recently as 1997.

The decriminalisation of consensual homosexual acts removed a stigma which had blighted the lives of hundreds of thousands of Australians. There would, I dare say, be very few people today who would argue that the removal of that stigma was not a good thing, although it is surprising to think that it only occurred so recently. But merely to decide that conduct should not be the subject of the criminal law is a long way short of acceptance. By decriminalising consensual homosexual acts the Australian community only began its long, halting journey to recognising the complete equality of gay people—a journey first of toleration, then of acceptance, then of respect and, at last, of embrace.

In the coming days, 45 years since Murray Hill and his colleagues in the South Australian parliament set Australia on that journey, this week in the Senate and next week in the other place we will complete it. These late spring and early summer days of 2017 will always be remembered as a time when the parliament heeded the wishes of the overwhelming majority of Australians that ours should be a society defined by greater decency, truer equality, more complete freedom. The full legal equality of gay people will, at last, have been recognised. Marriage equality will be a reality by Christmas.

To change the legal definition of 'marriage' so as to include same-sex couples is a profoundly important social reform. Significantly, it is a reform which began on the conservative side of politics. Those who have followed the intellectual history of this issue locate its commencement to a single point in time—the publication in the New Republic magazine in August 1989 of the article 'Here comes the groom' written by the leading American conservative writer Andrew Sullivan. It proved to be one of the most influential articles of the late 20th century because it kicked off the gay marriage debate. It is noteworthy that Andrew Sullivan is also the author of one of the finest contemporary essays on conservatism—The Conservative Soul. In the 1990s, left-wing opinion leaders condemned Sullivan's argument for gay marriage, not because they were against gays but because they were against marriage, recognising that marriage is an intrinsically conservative institution. It is only in more recent years that those on the left have changed their tune and belatedly adopted gay marriage as a cause.

Profoundly important though the acceptance of same-sex marriage may be as a social change, its symbolic significance is even greater still. With the passage of this bill, we will demolish the last significant bastion of legal discrimination against people on the grounds of their sexuality. At last, Australia will no longer be insulting gay people by saying, 'Different rules apply to you.' So this bill is important not merely because it will enable gay people to marry, just as everybody else is able to marry; it is more important than that. After centuries of prejudice, discrimination, rejection and ridicule, it is both an expiation for past wrongs and a final act of acceptance and embrace.

I want to reflect for a moment on the message this will send in particular to young gay people—to the boy or girl who senses a difference from their friends which they find difficult to understand and impossible to deal with. In his first speech in the parliament, my friend Tim Wilson spoke movingly of his own experience of confronting that knowledge as a tormenting fear that took an energetic 12-year-old and hollowed his confidence to eventually doubt his legitimate place in the world. How many hundreds of thousands of young Australians have known that fear? How many have lived with it silently and alone? How many have failed to come to terms with it and been overborne by it? By passing this bill we are saying to those vulnerable young people: 'There is nothing wrong with you—you are not unusual, you are not abnormal, you are just you. There is nothing to be embarrassed about, there is nothing to be ashamed of, there is nothing to hide. You are a normal person and, like every other normal person, you have a need to love. How you love is how God made you. Whom you love is for you to decide and others to respect.'

Wednesday, 15 November, when the result of the postal survey was announced, was a day the like of which Australia has seldom seen. At a time when the prevailing public mood is one of frustration and cynicism, that cynicism gave way to rejoicing. As the Prime Minister said, the Australian people have spoken in their millions. They voted yes for fairness, they voted yes for commitment, they voted yes for love. It is important to acknowledge that people who were not persuaded about the desirability for change accepted the result with generosity and grace.

As the long road to homosexual law reform in Australia was begun 45 years ago by a Liberal politician, and the seminal intellectual case for same-sex marriage was made 28 years ago by a conservative writer, it is appropriate that it should have been brought to fulfilment by our Liberal government. Malcolm Turnbull is the first Australian Prime Minister to have advocated and prosecuted this cause, and it will stand as one of the signature achievements of the Turnbull government. It rises above tawdry day-to-day politics as an imperishable legacy.

If I may draw a comparison: nobody today remembers the arguments about the state of the economy, the policy controversies or the political intrigues that took place during the government of Harold Holt—like all political ephemera, they have faded into history—but people do remember the 1967 referendum, that great act of inclusion of Indigenous Australians. As the years and decades pass, its significance only grows. I predict that, like the 1967 referendum, this decision by the Australian people, enabled by their government and enacted by their parliament, will come to be seen as one of those occasional shining moments that stand out in our nation's history about which people will still speak with admiration in decades, indeed centuries, to come as one of those breakthroughs that has, as the will of history turns, defined us as a people.

As Senator Smith said in his speech introducing this bill, success has many fathers. Although this achievement was brought to fulfilment by a Liberal government and a Liberal Prime Minister, it would be churlish not to knowledge the role of so many in the Labor Party in also promoting this cause. I can well imagine their frustration during the six years of the Rudd and Gillard governments when the cause was delayed, because it is the same frustration I have felt at times with leaders on my own side of politics. But, in the end, after many years and false steps on both sides of politics and through many stops and starts, we have come, at last, to this end. As Martin Luther King famously said, 'the arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice'.

The bill we are debating tonight is the work of many hands, but it is our colleague Dean Smith who was the author of the final version. Dean has, through a long and politically difficult process, displayed abundant tenacity and conspicuous moral courage. I was privileged to have been Dean's confidante at critical times in the last several weeks, and I know better than most the burdens of stress, of loneliness and of hurt he endured to make Australia a better place for countless others. Whatever else he may achieve in what has already been a significant political career, Dean Smith will always be remembered for this. Dean is one of a group of parliamentarians who, in the 45th Parliament, resolved, at some considerable risk to their own political careers, that they would not allow this issue to be pushed off any further. Among them, we should recognise, in particular, the member for Goldstein, Tim Wilson; the member for North Sydney, Trent Zimmerman; and the member for Brisbane, Trevor Evans.

But, of course, towering above this debate, we must acknowledge the seminal role of the member for Leichhardt, Warren Entsch. Warren Entsch deserves to be remembered as—and, I dare say, is already well on the way to becoming—one of the great folkloric figures of Australian politics. Many think him an unlikely champion of the cause of same-sex marriage. And, yet, he is, in many ways, its ideal champion, embodying, as he does, in his exuberance, his generosity, his larrikin spirit and his gentle soul, so many of the qualities which are so essentially Australian. In the years to come, he deserves to be celebrated in song and story as an icon of our age.

I also acknowledge the important role in the 44th Parliament of the former member for Longman, Wyatt Roy, who, more than most, kept this issue alive during the time of Prime Minister Abbott. I find it amusing and not a little satisfying that so many of those on my side of politics who have made marriage equality possible have come from the Queensland LNP.

I want to acknowledge the contribution of a few others. My own office has worked with many to bring about this reform for a long time. I say to my staff, in particular to my former Deputy Chief of Staff, Josh Faulks, my Senior Adviser, Dr Susan Cochrane, and above all my Chief of Staff, Liam Brennan: you have played a crucial role in the history which is being made today. I wish also to acknowledge the officers of the Attorney-General's Department led by Ashleigh Saint who worked tirelessly on the initial exposure draft of the bill published last year from which much of the current bill is drawn and who have also prepared the technical amendments which I will move in the committee stage which will ensure consistency between this bill and the rest of Commonwealth law.

Australia may have been slow to reach this day—we are the last of the English-speaking democracies and one of the last countries in what was once called 'Western Christendom' to embrace marriage equality—but when that day did come it came triumphantly, it came joyously and it came, most importantly, from the Australian people themselves. Like all of the best and most enduring social change, it was not imposed from above. The will for it germinated in the hearts and minds of the people themselves. Now that the Australian people have spoken, it is for us, their elected representatives, to respond. And so let us now complete the task which they have set for us and for which so many of us have worked for so long.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.