Love wins in Australia as parliament passes marriage equality
Dean Smith’s marriage equality bill has passed parliament and will become law in Australia, after passing the House of Representatives, with only four MPs voting against it.
After passing the Senate last week, the marriage equality bill has been debated in the lower house since Monday.
MPs made a number of memorable addresses to parliament this week, from Linda Burney’s emotional speech honouring her late son, to Bob Katter’s bizarre late-night rant about boys being forced to wear dresses.
After Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull made the unprecedented order for parliament to sit for as long as it took to pass marriage equality, the bill has passed on the final scheduled day of sitting for the year.
The bill will now go on to the Governor-General for Royal Assent, then becoming law and allowing same-sex marriage to be legally recognised in Australia.
Though a number of proposed amendments were debated, the bill was passed without changes.
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The total hypocrisy of the Federal Parliament astounds me. No one in the Parliament should be proud of themselves.
They finally did the job for which they are well paid, and have the hide to party afterwards at our expense.
They “granted” us our HUMAN Right, nothing more. boggling and they celebrate
The emotional pain the whole debacle has cost along way if mind boggling, let alone the financial cost.
They should hand their collective heads in shame and apologise .
In fairness Roy the Senate did what it could to block the plebiscite, it actually won against the government. What came next was not what the Liberals had promised – it was a “statistical survey” done without the assent of Parliament but enabled by the High Court.
So really, it’s no one at the High Court who should be proud of themselves. They enabled a completely unstatistical “statistical survey” as never promised by the Liberals at an election and replacing a measure already rejected by the Parliament.
The members of both houses should still hang their heads n shame including those who attempted to block the survey, as this should have been dealt with over a decade ago. Successive governments from 2004 onwards had the opportunity to recognise this as a Human Rights issue, and failed. The two major parties should not hold any join in passing this Bill.
Perhaps now
we can begin to address some of the cumulative trauma which many of our communities have lived through.
We have shown great resilience in the face of adversity.
Well obviously everyone can have their opinion but I for one salute the efforts of everyone who tried to stop the plebiscite/survey including the Labor, Greens, Xenephon and Hinch groups in the Senate, everyone involved with the High Court appeal, shout out to Rodney Croome and all of the community who lobbied to avoid this unconstitutional and unprecedented referral to ‘the tyranny of the majority’. The survey was morally wrong, attempting to block it was morally right, voting Yes was helpful (in fact wonderful) but I won’t judge those who couldn’t bring themselves to participate for moral reasons.
Suck it conservative politicians who demanded a plebiscite because “this issue is too important for politicians”. You’d have retained a degree of control over the process if you hadn’t done that, instead you’ve lost the lot and you can only blame yourselves.
The likes of the appalling Matt Canavan, a man so committed to traditional families that he is the only person in Parliament to have held a press conference with the express purpose of bagging out his own mother, tried to impose the tyranny of the majority with a public vote accompanied by a dishonest scare campaign. Well taste it now Canavan. The majority has spoken and by a significant margin they reckon you’re an arsehole.
And this is just the beginning. The High Court ruling which let the survey proceed is an amazing green light to any future government who wants to put a controversial issue to public vote to engineer a result. Churches will pay taxes thanks to a process like this in the future. And I’ll be cheering all the way.