A D-minus for Queensland pollies
For Australia’s third largest gay community, the Queensland state election was a slap in the face.
GLBT Queenslanders have been crying out for inclusion in upcoming adoption reforms, while the state remains the only one with an unequal age of consent for anal sex.
But despite a January Galaxy poll showing over half of Queenslanders support same-sex marriage and civil unions (a good indication of intentions on other equality issues), gay equality was left off the agenda by both the majors, while the Greens made a piss-poor effort in courting the pink vote.
The big surprise of the campaign was the conservative Liberal-National Party buying full-page ads in the pink press and taking questions from gay journos seriously despite promising no real reform.
In comparison, just one Labor candidate advertised while the Greens were notably absent. Both parties’ response to queries from the gay press was summed up in an editorial in Q今日吃瓜: We would like to quote Premier Bligh’s and the Greens commitments, however we have nothing to report.
While the Queensland Greens are touting this as their most successful campaign ever, they barely moved in the poll, with a miniscule gain of 0.1 percent statewide.
With voter disquiet over the Traveston Dam and a major environmental disaster in the form of an oil slick coating Queensland beaches mid-campaign, this should have been a dream run for any environmental party. Instead they barely made ground.
They also made poor use of online resources, with just a handful of updates to their website (the tattiest of all the Greens’ state branches) during the entire campaign.
The words -藴gay’ and -藴lesbian’ didn’t even appear in the Queensland Greens online manifesto. With some deep digging I identified just one policy of relevance to pink voters: Apply anti-discrimination laws to all educational institutions, public and private.
The Greens may know they’re the most committed in the state when it comes to GLBT equality but it doesn’t help them if GLBT people don’t know that. They cannot afford to take the pink vote for granted.
If there’s one consolation, it’s that Family First’s support more than halved. Queenslanders were previously the party’s biggest supporters outside South Australia, so if they can’t get a hearing in Queensland, they’re unlikely to get one anywhere.
“It sickens me that a criminal can get married in jail if he or she wants to, but I can’t get married despite being a good and loving person.”
Shan, that’s an excellent point and one I’ve been thinking about for some time now- we are constantly told that marriage is not for gays because it’s about raising children- yet rapists, murderers and others who have proved beyond the shadow of a doubt that they are unfit to be parents have never, not in this century or in the past, been barred from marriage, and many jurisdictions allow such individuals to marry while still serving out their sentences. Surely the message that sends to gay kids is that the very worst of heterosexual relationships are better than the very best of ours.
Queensland is backward with regards to many things when compared to the rest of Australia and yet they want to be the smart state or a state ahead of all others. Well here’s a clue, start with making all your tax paying citizens equal under the law, rather than discriminating when it suits you.
It sickens me that a criminal can get married in jail if he or she wants to, but I can’t get married despite being a good and loving person.