SOUTH Australian Premier Mike Rann has demanded that same-sex marriage be made legal, challenging the Gillard government to change the commonwealth Marriage Act and describing anything less as a “halfway house”.
With just weeks left in office, the longest-serving of the current premiers and one-time ALP national president, last night invoked the views of his former boss Don Dunstan to “add my voice to those calling for homosexual couples to have the legal right to marry . . . so that we are no longer diminished as a society”.
“It is, quite simply, unfair to prevent same-sex couples from having their relationship — a union that is viewed as equal in every other aspect of the law — being recognised as a legal marriage,” Mr Rann said. “It only serves to undermine the legitimacy of their relationship and their family”.
Delivering the Flinders University Investigator lecture, Mr Rann was speaking a day after the Victorian ALP conference voted overwhelmingly to back the policy shift in a rebuff to Julia Gillard, who opposes same-sex marriage.
All ALP state conferences — except NSW — have backed same-sex marriage. Tasmanian Premier Lara Giddings and her Labor government last month backed a Greens motion calling on the Gillard government to introduce same-sex marriage.
Criticising civil union procedures, Mr Rann argued that changing the Marriage Act was the only way to properly recognise same-sex marriages.
“This must be through the institution of marriage at a federal level,” Mr Rann said. “Rather than the halfway house of civil unions, as recently introduced in some other states, as well as in New Zealand and the UK.
“These civil unions stand as the more timid solution to the issue of same-sex relationships — the escape clause for those who want to see marriage reserved exclusively for relationships between a man and a woman.”
On the weekend, ALP members in Melbourne defied opposition from the influential right-wing shop assistants’ union — which rejected the move on the grounds it would be debated at national conference — to support same-sex marriage.
The conference backed amending the national platform to support the legal right of couples of marriageable age to be married if they chose. It voted for any same-sex marriage to be recognised and registered by law.
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