Andrea Rohr – Post 1 – Equal Rights
Part 1
The Age, “Court allows gay man to adopt child,” Maris Beck
http://www.theage.com.au/victoria/court-allows-gay-man-to-adopt-child-20100911-15622.html
In Victoria, a judge allowed a gay man to adopt his foster son in what is to be believed the first of its kind in for the state.
This follows a bill being passed early this week by the New South Wales Parliament, which gives same-sex couples full adoption rights.
The child, now 11, and his parents are grateful for the adoption. The boy expressed his feelings to The Sunday Age saying, “I'm really glad that I'm adopted. They always play with me and they do fun activities with me like going to the park and watching me play footy. It's a really good thing.''
Part 2
The Gay Marriage Blog. Get Engaged, “Australian Greens Must Hold Line.”
http://www.thegaymarriageblog.com/2010/08/australian-greens-must-hold-line/
After the recent 2010 election, the Australian Greens now hold a Senate seat in every state, giving them a balance of power. Now, the question concerning many Australian gay and lesbians is whether or not the Greens will fulfill their promise and bring gay marriage and gay rights to the center stage.
Australian Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, needs Greens votes to form an agenda. Many believe Penny Wong, the only openly lesbian Cabinet member, needs to stand up for equal rights, because she has rarely done so in the past.
Everyone who believes all humankind deserves equal rights needs to stand up and let their voices be heard. If not, change will never come.
Part 3
Australia, much like the United States, is at a crossroads for granting equal rights. This crossroads has occurred many times before with race, class, religion, and gender rights being the subject of controversy. Now, it is time for gay and lesbian rights to be thrust onto center stage.
One of the most interesting aspect brought up was that the Australia’s Greens, much like the Green Party of the United States, actually hold a Senate seat in each state giving them a balance of power. As far as I’m aware, only Republicans and Democrats currently hold sway over the Senate in the U.S. It will be interesting to see how the Green’s use this newly acquired power and whether they play it safe, or use the newly granted authority to hear the voice of the people that brought them to this position.
Both sources share different success stories and speak of the upcoming battles for equality. I hope both countries will soon accept their citizens for whom they are and grant them the rights they deserve.
One needs to be careful when one talks of authority granted by the people when one is referring to the Australian Senate.
ReplyDeletePaul Keating, a former Australian Prime Minister, once famously referred to the Australian Senate as "unrepresentative swill", ironically because the extreme fairness of the Senate voting procedure can produce outcomes that may not reflect the nation's will as a whole.
Unlike the U.S. Senate, where a plurality of the vote gets you a seat, the Australian Senate vote is a preferential vote for proportional representation.
This means that a voter gets to number all the candidates from highest to lowest (i.e. 1-60 in the case of the Victorian Senate candidates) in order of preference. In practice most voters follow the party ticket which tells them how to apportion their preferences.
As the 2010 election was only for half the Senate (Senate terms are twice as long as lower house terms, with half the Senate up for election each time), the quota required for election was 14.3% of the vote in a particular state - 581,525 votes if you were standing in New South Wales, or only 47,092 votes if you were standing in Tasmania.
The preferential system works as follows - I'll use Victoria as an example - The Labor Party received 37.84% of the first preference vote, which equals 2.6486 quotas. That means they have two senators elected automatically, and the .6486 of their quota remaining gets distrubuted among the other candidates according to the preferences marked on the ballot papers. This can produced some odd results - in the current election Victoria now has a senator from the Democratic Labor Party (DLP), who only received 2.33% of the first preference votes, but has won his seat on the preferences of other parties flowing to him.
So, in terms of first preference votes, The Greens only scored a quota in their own right in Victoria - they were relying on preferences in every other State to get them over the line. On a national level 87% of voters DIDN'T vote for the Greens with their first preference.
This means that The Greens hold the balance of power in the Senate, but most of the nation's voters didn't vote directly for them. They will have a very fine line to walk in the current parliamentary term, both to satisfy their core supporters, and to try and garner more support.
The gay marriage issue will be a fraught one for them - their core supporters are strongly in favour, but the nation as a whole is against allowing it, which is reflected in the current policies of the major parties (Labor and Liberal). The Greens will have to work slowly and consultatively to gather more support in the public for the issue - the worst thing they could do is bring it quickly to a vote in the Parliament, as they are bound to lose.
With the balance of power, they now have a much stronger platform from which to argue, as they will garner much more media attention than they did in the past.
The unfortunate thing about the current iteration of The Greens is their tendency to think that they own the moral high ground and that anyone who disagrees with them is an ignoramus. They will need to lose this attitude and learn to work productively with other groups in the community if they wish to progress their policies.
Let's not forget that in the last Parliament The Greens did not negotiate with Labor over their Carbon Pollution Reduction Scheme, with the result that it was defeated, bringing down a Prime Minister and pushing Greenhouse a long way down the issues ladder for the Labor party. If they had been prepared to negotiate, and accept something rather than nothing, Australia may have had a scheme in place already, and with The Greens in their current position, they would have been well placed to improve on it. As it stands it's still not clear that any Greenhouse policy will get up in this term of Parliament. One hopes that Bob Brown and his team learn something from this lesson.
We'll wait and see.
http://www.perthnow.com.au/news/western-australia/greens-senator-bob-brown-says-gillard-wrong-to-oppose-gay-marriage/story-e6frg13u-1225886249111
ReplyDeleteThis article from the Perth Now talks about the Greens‘ senator Bob Brown opposing Julia Gillard’s views of gay marriage. Adding to the article previously posted called “The Australian Greens must Hold Line,” this article supports the fact that the Greens want Gillard to be in support of legalizing gay marriage. It is interesting how Brown points out that electing the first women prime minister is progressive step forward, yet “her view was behind the times and demonstrated that although the ALP may be progressive in having a woman as leader, it is still a very conservative party.”