A rant about politics, gay marriage and a beautiful video

TL;DR: Australian politics sucks, go watch the video.


People outside of Australia won't be aware of this, but gay marriage is shaping up to be a big political issue in the near future. It actually has strong community support; more than 60% of the population is in favour of legalising gay marriage. It's also a federal issue here, which makes things a lot clearer than in the USA.

A little over a year ago, we got our first female Prime Minister, Julia Gillard. As it happens, she's also our first atheist PM. From being wildly popular as a leftist, outspoken, deputy PM (she deposed the sitting PM, rather than winning an election from opposition), she's jumped her politics straight to the centre and now doesn't say squat if it hasn't been run past ten spinmeisters and a focus group. So now she has the lowest approval rating of any recent leader - even worse than John Howard, who lied to the electorate repeatedly and got us in to the Iraq war when only 9% of the country supported it. She also almost lost an election due to her sheer uninspiringness, resulting in a hung parliament and a minority government.

Anyway, I got sidetracked. We were all happy that an atheist, strongly left-of-centre leader had gotten in and were all sure that gay marriage would be one of the first pieces of legislation she introduced. Not so. Since day one, she's been strongly against it. Her initial excuse was that the Labour party policy was anti-gay marriage and that she didn't have the power to overturn that (rubbish). More recently, she's been talking about how there are "deeply held convictions in society" - somehow ignoring that the more strongly held convictions are in support of changing the law.

The Labour Party conference is coming up and it's the #1 issue to be discussed, in order to officially change the party policy. Almost every state-level Labour Party has passed resolutions in support of gay marriage and insisting that the federal party should do the same.

So... what does Julia Gillard do? She tells everyone that she's going to allow the bill to go to parliament, but make it a conscience vote. For those not familiar with the concept, it means that the members of parliament can vote according to their personal beliefs and aren't forced to follow party line. This also means that the bill is doomed, as the Labour Party doesn't actually hold a majority in the parliament; to pass any laws, they have to get three out of four independent and minor-party MPs to agree with them. Given that several Labour MPs are strongly Catholic and are under a lot of pressure from the church not to support any changes, and given that the (right wing) Liberal Party is not going to allow their members to vote with their conscience, this means that it's more or less impossible for this law to be passed.

So, that's shit.




Anyway, I never actually intended to spend 20 minutes writing up this essay. I just thought the following video needed some context.

I think it's beautiful.