The morning after
May 5th, 2008 by Rebecca
It’s been a fairly sombre day after yesterday’s revelation that the Civil Partnerships Bill, or at least the most important elements of it, were dead in the water.
We’ve done what we could to get at least some comment out there; for my part, several comments from me are included in this morning’s Age, and I’ve spoken to both ABC and Prime News during the day; a colleague spoke to several other papers. We now start preparing for a snap action on Saturday to make community outrage absolutely bloody clear, but the battle for this bill at least seems over. It isn’t the end of the line for the campaign, though - as I’ve been telling the press today, it may now be five years instead of five weeks until we see civil unions in the territory, but we ain’t going anywhere.
We’ve learned a lot through this campaign. Starting from a base of practically nothing in February, we’ve been given a crash course in everything from handling the press through to dealing directly with politicians; the challenge now is to make sure that experience doesn’t go to waste. There are still LGBT issues here that need fighting in the short term; the Discrimination Act is badly written; the trans sex recognition laws are flawed, and there’s a near-complete lack of queer support services in the territory apart from those directly related to sexual health. In the long term, we have campaigns for civil unions and same-sex marriage to fight, and it’s about time we started using our proximity to Capital Hill to our advantage.
There’s one last thing I want to put out there about yesterday, though. It’s my personal position that the ACT government did do everything they could do to get this bill up, and while I wish they had ploughed ahead anyway so we could have given the federal government a kicking, I can understand why they wouldn’t in the face of practically certain defeat; hell, I told Simon Corbell personally during the week that I was concerned about couples who need legal rights now being screwed if we were left without relationship recognition laws for another year due to an override, even in light of the above.
Which is why I find the timing of yesterday’s announcement very curious. The ACT government has everything to gain from blowing this sky high, even in defeat; being the defender of territory rights and the party of progressive reform are popular themes here (Stanhope’s popularity went through the roof the last time we went through this in 2006, even though he lost then too), and they’re facing an election in five months where the main threat to their majority is coming from the Greens, not the Liberals.
Yet they chose to release the news that the bill had been withdrawn under pressure on a Sunday afternoon that also happened to be the day of the Logie Awards, and the day before the territory budget, with previews of the most important spending commitments leaked to the media. While Stanhope has been on the attack today (I haven’t had time to read the reports yet, but the reporter from the ABC told me that he’d had some rough things to say about Rudd), that’s a timing that smells very heavily of trying to bury the story. There was no clear reason why the announcement needed to be released yesterday in particular, yet they have nothing obvious to gain from burying it. I’m still prepared to publicly come out in support of Corbell and Stanhope’s actions right through until today, but the cynic in me might say that I smell a bit of a rat.
I had a bit of a chat with Heidi… she is keen to start agitating for trans rights… she said she’d be in touch when she saw my eyes light up.
That’s really good to hear, although I hope she’ll do so within the framework of the CCU (or whatever comes of us after this campaign) though; Good Process is always going to have that problem of having so many closeted members, and it being so hard to join is a huge turnoff.