It’s time the LGBTI community gave Western Sydney and immigrant Australia a ‘fair go’
Image: Images: Ann-Marie Calilhanna (left) and Cameron McPhedran (right)
Australia deserves to be a proud country right now. We voted convincingly in favour of marriage equality.
However, as an LGBTIQA+ community, we should not knock Western Sydney and immigrant Australians.
Australia’s richness as a multicultural nation, although sometimes vexed, exists because of our immigrant heritage, not in spite of it.
Much has been made of the high No percentage of No votes recorded in Western Sydney, with the electorates of Blaxland, Watson, McMahon, Fowler, Werriwa, and Parramatta all recording No votes higher than 60 per cent.
These communities are not bigoted. Immigrant communities are not bigoted.
We need to understand and connect with these communities, not write them off. Ultimately, when we attack these communities, we are stigmatising complex experiences around culture, identity, and trauma.
As LGBTIQA+ people who have also often navigated many similar issues of trauma, we are attacking a group that has experiences with marginalisation similar to our own. We are also stigmatising the experiences of people who have immigrant heritage and are LGBTIQA+.
I have a proud immigrant heritage, and am also proudly gay.
My mum was born in Germany in 1949. She was an infant when my grandparents came to Australia after World War Two. I grew up in the federal electorate of Bradfield.
For me, growing up gay, the straitjacket of a conservative immigrant culture was a defining part of my socialisation.
The family was everything, and the family was oh so straight and structured. Our grandfather, or our ‘Opi,’ was incredibly hardworking and frugal. Opi turned off his car at traffic lights and going down hills to save money on petrol, long before Sydney petrol prices even approached a dollar a litre.
My cousins and brothers were my best friends, and still are. My mum installed a lock on our television, determined for us to read voraciously and make the most of our education.
If politics was discussed, the tone was conservative, and didactic. The childhood experiences of my Sri Lankan friends resonate with me so much more than my Anglo-Australian friends whose immigrant heritage is a lot more distant than mine.
Ultimately, this acculturation gave me a foundation of love amongst my family members that non-immigrant families rarely even can come close to.
My heritage also gave me the enduring and hardwired determination to pursue my goals: between us, my two brothers and I have five university degrees.
I would not give up these formative experiences for anything, However I also acknowledge that in my family and many other immigrant families, issues of diversity around sexuality and gender identity are barely touched on until they have to be, like when LGBITQA+ family members disclose their identities.
Many No voters in Western Sydney have experienced similar immigrant acculturation.
Let’s take Blaxland as an example. Its main suburbs are Auburn, Bankstown, Lidcombe, South Granville, Villawood, Berrala, Yagoona, Guilford, Chester Hill, Condell Park, and Georges Hall. The ABS notes that common ancestry for its residents are Lebanese, Chinese, ‘Australian’, Vietnamese, and English people.
However, whilst 73.9 per cent of Blaxland voted No, the electorate also facilitates some of the most powerful progressive voices about issues of race, gender, and identity I have encountered across all of Sydney.
The Bankstown Poetry Slam was founded by local community members from across Blaxland and other neighbouring parts of Western Sydney. It is amazing, and has been recognised as such.
It was founded in 2013 and is now the largest poetry slam in all of Australia. I have performed and spoken at Bankstown Slam events as gay, ‘white’, and ‘different’ from most of its other attendees, immigrants whose families have come to Australia more recently than my grandparents did and who largely live in Bankstown and its surrounding suburbs. I have been received with nothing but warmth and love at these events.
The organising team of the Bankstown Poetry Slam have also facilitated writing workshops since 2015 in under-resourced and culturally diverse Sydney high schools. This program is called ‘Real Talk’, and has been recognised for its contribution to peer education, anti-bullying, and social justice.
Also in Western Sydney, the Muslim Australian social development organisation Mission of Hope facilitates leadership programs for people from across all of Sydney.
In 2014, it hosted the Multicultural Youth Leadership Conference at Sydney Olympic Park, which was another event that stimulated my involvement in diverse community development programs across Sydney.
Overall, involvement in these spaces has nourished me and provided me with strength and connection navigating marginality with dignity and commitment to social justice.
All communities are complex, and Blaxland as an electorate has many more dimensions to it than the Bankstown Poetry Slam, Real Talk, and inspirational community organisers, writers, and poets. Still, in many ways I feel more accepted among its many Vietnamese salad roll businesses and in my beloved ‘slam fam’ than I do on Oxford Street.
Whilst much of Western Sydney voted No, that vast area provides love and strength to Australia, including LGBTIQA+ Australia. Beyond Blaxland, the Arab Film Festival in Parramatta, the Blacktown Arts Centre, and Haldon Street in Lakemba are just a few examples of spaces that provide life and energy to multicultural Australia.
It’s time we as an LGBTIQA+ community pay it forward. It’s time we gave Western Sydney and immigrant Australia a ‘fair go’.
Cameron, if you were a jew in 1930’s Germany I suppose you would have voted for Hitler (which you parents probably did) all in the name of not discriminating against National Socialists. Grow up. All I see is a publicity-seeking gay whore making outrageous statements just to get media coverage.
This is bullshit. I am over apologising for these people in Western Sydney. They have no respect for us and have made it quite clear they they will continue to fight against our rights. There is no comparison between growing up with European born parents on the prosperous and relatively progressive North Shore and the closed minded, violent Maronite Christian community in Western Sydney. I’ll give them a fair go when they stop vandalising our murals and denying us equality.
Peak liberalism. Muslims do not support gay, lesbian, trans rights, and they won’t ever. If you condemn christians for their behaviours but forgive muslims because (and excuse me while i choke quoting you) “we are stigmatising complex experiences around culture, identity, and trauma”, you are both a hypocrite and a fool.
Grow a spine, call a homophobe a homophobe, allah or not. Until then you are a joke.
Migrants that come to Australia to escape persecution in their homeland would do well to remember that bringing discriminatory attitudes with them against the lgbti community is not acceptable. It is our community that has supported them against attacks by conservatives yet they didn’t give this a thought when voting against us. Perhaps they will when our support is no longer forthcoming.
Firstly, you’re not wrong.
But secondly we all have discriminatory attitudes, Marsha. I’m a bigot, and my bigotry has only increased in the wake of some incredibly worthless claims made by the No campaign recently. I’m openly bigoted against Margaret Court, John Howard, Tony Abbott, Matt Canavan, many archbishops and my “I support traditional marriage even though I divorced my traditional marriage wife because I had a girlfriend who is now my second wife” step-father. I wear my bigotry with pride and so should everyone else.
Everyone brings their discriminatory attitudes with them wherever they go. Why bag out recent immigrants for doing exactly what you and I do every day? Would you adopt a sharia law attitude if you traveled to a sharia law area in this world? I should hope not, but it’s your call.
The folks you are complaining about largely live in Labor electorates where their MP will cast a Yes vote in the House despite their electorate’s public No vote, as they promised to do when they got elected last year. That’s how you make a community think. That’s challenging them and making some difference.
Cutting yourself off from them achieves exactly as much as boycotting the recent survey – bugger all. But like the folks who boycotted the survey I can’t hold it against you because you’re not actually wrong in what you say.
Good article and good comment from Alannah. If anything the experiences in the article and comment highlight how appalling the idea of putting marriage equality to a public vote actually was.
When Parliament considers a policy issue (as they have with marriage equality) the Senate generally sets up a committee to take submissions and expert evidence. It becomes quickly clear who the winners and losers might be and how they will be affected. An evidence-based decision hopefully results (unless political agendas override it, which of course can also happen). In the case of marriage equality, millions and millions of Australians had an equal say no matter how significantly impacted by the issue they would be. This was bullshit.
Many many No voters will experience zero direct personal consequences to marriage equality. They are welcome to their opinion but at the end of the day gay couples wanting to marry has a big impact on the gay couple and their friends and family and zero impact on pretty well everyone else. So why does everyone get an equal say when most have no skin in the game? The Liberal Party has never explained this. They just blew a hundred million of taxpayer dollars instead.
The bottom line is that the 75% vote in some outer western Sydney migrant communities doesn’t mean they hate gay or trans folks. It just means they gave their opinion on an issue they don’t actually give a shit about (even the “voluntary” nature of the poll might not have been understood due to language issues and our general tendency towards compulsory voting), because it doesn’t affect them directly in any way, and they can move on quite easily.
The day they vote out their Labor federal MP for voting Yes in Parliament against their popular vote is the day I’ll admit what I’ve said here is completely wrong.
75% of people voted no, but somehow “these communities are not bigoted.”
Really?! How do LGBT kids in those households fair?
Hanson is ugly. So is this vote.
Fighting trans and homophobia is undermined by simplistic calls to “understand and connect” to No voting communities.
We cannot trade off the dignity and worth of young queer kids because there are some other “powerful progressive voices” in those postcodes.
There is always root causes to homophobia – accommodating and dressing it up doesn’t change the impact it is having, nor the need to call it out loudly
“75% of people voted no, but somehow “these communities are not bigoted.”
Really?! How do LGBT kids in those households fair?
Hanson is ugly. So is this vote.”
Hanson hates the multicultural communities who voted No and they hate her. So that’s a tad weird for you to claim a relationship there. She only likes traditional Aussie homophobes.
Secondly, of course this vote was ugly but these communities largely elected Labor MP’s who OPPOSED HAVING A PUBLIC VOTE. So why blame them for it?
The facts don’t back up your assertions.
Dave, not clear what facts you are citing…we get your argument, we heard it often enough from News Corp, that not all No voters are bigots. To which I respond “but all bigots are no voters.”
You’ve misunderstood the Hanson reference.
We should speak out against Hanson’s ugly and shrill xenophobia.
We can also speak out against homophobia whether its hiding behind a bible or the Koran.
Nor is it acceptable to excuse homophobia on cultural grounds, or in the author’s ridiculous words “stigmatising complex experiences around culture, identity, and trauma.”
I put the suffering of LGT people ahead of excuses for its perpetrators.
The facts I’m citing are pretty self-evident. While you are right that these communities are overrepresented by homophobes, they have nothing to do with Hansonism but instead come from ignorance and limited education, particularly in western education and you were tying these things as if related in your first post. The second point I’m making which you are desperate to ignore is that those communities overwhelmingly elected MPs who support marriage equality and will vote Yes in Parliament as per their promise to their electorates last election. The community’s No votes are for the most part having no impact on the overall decision. You are just desperate to find a reason to bag out the brown people of western Sydney.
If you need to bag out anyone it’s the white Liberal voting “Aussies” who supported holding the “statistical survey” in the first place. That’s where the “it’s ok to vote No” message started.
But as I’ve said before on these pages, the day that western Sydney migrant communities vote Liberal to punish their Yes voting Labor MP is the day I’ll admit I’m completely wrong.
Agree Cameron – I am trans, usually go to Sydney once a week and on way down usually stop and shop at Westfield Parramatta – never any issues and people really welcoming – after my initial trepidation this has since disappeared so we need to have an open mind beyond the vote