On Friday, 5th of June this year, my partner Beck and I were married in Vancouver, Canada. However, since arriving home in Australia, our marriage is no longer recognised, and this has brought significant sadness to our lives, and also to our families who were unable to travel to Vancouver to be with us on our special day.
Beck and I are now in the bizarre predicament, that we are married in a growing number of countries in the world, but not married here in our own country.
Some people find this funny, saying we have the ‘best of both worlds’ we can get on a plane and be married one day, and get off a plane and be free of the ‘ball and chain’ the next. But this situation is far from funny to us. It is heartbreaking because we want to be married all the time, not just in certain parts of the world.
For Beck and I, getting married was the ultimate act of commitment. It was a way to unite our lives and our families together formally, and something that we felt was important to do before we have children. Marriage is a rite of passage in our society, and a means to strengthen the bond between two individuals and their families. It creates a strong legal relationship to help protect the rights of children within that family. We recently relocated from Melbourne to Tasmania to pursue a simpler life and be closer to family. Much like any other heterosexual couple, marriage was part of the natural progression of our relationship at this stage in our lives.
To have our overseas marriage recognised in Australia is particularly important to us, because the Federal Government has recently introduced law changes that now see same-sex relationships placed on an equal footing to heterosexual couples for tax and other day-to-day purposes. This is great in many ways, because the Government now sees us as a ‘couple’. But at the same time, the Government refuses to accept that we are actually a married couple. We feel that this is hypocritical and cruel. This basically tells us that our leaders are happy to treat us equally when it comes to earning more tax revenue or cutting social security, but are also happy to discriminate against us when it comes to giving us the full legal equality other Australians enjoy.
Let’s be clear, I applaud the recent changes made to many federal laws to acknowledge same-sex entitlements. These are long over due and are a great step forward. I believe it is fair that same-sex couples are treated equally to everyone else and that this should also include the fact that we are all taxed the same way. But we deserve to be treated equally in every way, not in a watered down “partial equality” that suits the government, but still separates us from our heterosexual friends and creates a confusing mess of different rules and entitlements in different parts of Australia.
It might be hard to comprehend if you are not in a same-sex relationship, but we are often not even sure what our rights are a lot of the time, especially in different states. It can be very confusing, and it can be very hard to find information. It is very sad, that in this day and age in Australia, the land of the ‘fair go’, there is still a group of citizens like us, who have to regularly log on to Google and devote significant chunks of time to working out what our rights are in different parts of Australia whenever we want to embark on normal couple milestones.
Try to imagine, if you are not in a same-sex relationship, what it would be like, to live every day with the reality that you have to research your rights whenever you want to organise something significant in your life and that your rights were different depending on the state that you lived in. This treatment would be unheard of, if it were directed towards any other minority group, so it is hard for us to understand why it is still acceptable in Australia to discriminate against same-sex couples. We feel that this is certainly not a positive message to be teaching younger generations of Australians.
The simplest solution to the fact that our rights differ in different parts of Australia is to allow us to marry. Marriage provides society with a common language of love and commitment. It also provides society with a common understanding of legal rights and entitlements. There will be no more need to assert, dispute or google our rights when we can marry.
But worse than the inconvenience of not being able to marry is the message it sends. It just breaks our hearts that our own country doesn’t accept or acknowledge that we should have the same rights as other Australians. My wife and I work hard, we pay the same amount of tax as everyone else, we are saving as best we can to buy our first home, we love our families and our families love us, we are planning for our first child, we contribute as Australians every day to this nation, and yet still we are made to feel like we are second class citizens in our own country.
The majority of our close friends are heterosexual, and just about everyone we meet at work and in our general lives, seem to think same-sex couples should be allowed to marry. From our general interactions, the public seems way ahead of the Australian government on this one. We can also say, that during our travels overseas, people have been shocked and horrified to hear that Australia still does not acknowledge or allow same-sex marriages. Many people simply view Australia as ‘backwards’ in this regard.
We realise that some people find same-sex marriages upsetting due to religious beliefs, but we think institutionalised discrimination towards one group of citizens in a democratic country like Australia can never be justified. A nation like ours, which says it believes in equality, should put that belief into practice, Discrimination towards particular groups of Australians is something that the Australian Labour Party, in particular, opposes. We hope that at this week’s National Conference, the ALP will live up to its own principles by recognising Australians are not all equal until there is equality in marriage.
In ten or twenty years time, this debate will be looked back on with shame, much like periods in Australian history when Aboriginal Australians were not deemed to be citizens, or women were not allowed to vote. Many developed countries in the world have already reached this point.
Certainly, during our time spent in Canada, the country seemed to be functioning well, and there was no evidence that having same-sex marriage has destroyed family values or broken down social functions in anyway. Allowing same-sex marriage has not reduced the number of heterosexual marriages, or somehow demeaned the marriages between people with strong religious convictions. Life goes on as usual and Canadians can proudly say that they have true equality for citizens in their country.
While this debate continues to rage, somewhat belatedly here in Australia, all we can do is share our story and say a big thank you to all the wonderful people out there that have shown us so much support. These people are just everyday Australians, from different backgrounds, of different ages, who may not understand or feel particularly comfortable with same-sex relationships, but who have supported us anyway, because they believe in equality and a fair go
For those of you who still firmly oppose same-sex marriage, please try to realise that we are just ordinary Australians like the rest of you, and we just want the opportunity get married, have a family and work hard. We are not asking for special treatment, just equal treatment to everyone else. Surely that is not too much to ask.
The Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs is currently conducting the first full-scale inquiry into marriage equality in Australia. If you wish to make a submission, or sign on as a supporter of the Australian Marriage Equality submission, go here.
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