CM: I’ve just made yet another speech about Inequality exclusiveness and unfairness with their new electoral laws
DP: Their electoral laws, their immigration laws, their same sex laws
CM: Exactly – that’s what I’m trying to argue here, to get the rest of the opposition parties to stop talking always as if they were different things and just say these are the values of the Howard government, which are unfairness, inequality and exclusivity – they argue that they are good old Australian values, what I’m trying to argue that this is at the heart of everything they do, inequality, cutting people out and unfairness.
DP: You said when you introduced the decriminalisation in Tasmania that was a very unpleasant experience
CM: It was absolutely horrendous. I’ve been in the Tasmanian parliament since 1989 and since 1989 the greens had repeatedly introduced gay law reform, and it wasn’t until we got balance of power when I was the leader in 1996 that we had the opportunity to actually achieve it. Now by that time R Croome and Nick Turnen had taken the matter to the UN but still here was nothing happening to force the issue in Tasmania.
But at that time I had Michael Hodgemen who is still in the Liberal party in the Tasmanian parliament, a former federal member going on the ABC News saying I was the mother of teenage sodomy – MTS – pretty good isn’t it (laughs).
I had the Attorney General of the day saying that if this legislation went through then Tasmania would be overrun with pedophiles.
I anticipated it would make a huge difference in Tasmania because the culture was just so repressive and the meanness the meanness was awful and I knew it would be better but I had no idea the shift would be as profound as it was. It was like the windows and doors were opened, the sunshine as let in here was a level of inclusiveness and happiness and tolerance I was even overwhelmed by – it has a had profound impact on Tasmanian society in that we went from having the worst gay laws to having the best in the country at that time. And I’m really proud of that.
But I have to say that I got the most vile letters and phone calls I was abused in supermarkets and on the streets it just demonstrates the point that you have to stand up for what you believe in spite of it all and ultimately you’ll be proved to be right, and that’s what should have happened here on civil unions and it didn’t
DP: Here in Victoria the new leader of the Liberals, Ted Baillieu, has reportedly received death threats since he said he was in favour of civil unions.
CM: Yeah that’s right, Bob [Brown] and I have had any number of death threats over the years in relation to this, I’ve had church groups ringing up praying for me people telling me I’m going to burn in the fires of hell and goodness knows what else – and that’s why I made that point yesterday – that the people who call themselves Christians are frequently the people who write the nastiest most vindictive most un-christian things to people who are actually trying to seek – as I said yesterday, do you believe in discrimination, do you believe in equality before the law, fundamentally that’s what this is about and I just cant see how people who claim to be Christians cannot recognise that.
That’s what they can’t argue against. They always invoke a whole range of things from the Old Testament but the you know the Old Testament also, if you want to be literal, has people cutting off hands and tuning women into pillars of salt, and there a few odd inconsistencies there I’ve noted.
DP: What next? There’s a great deal happening on CUs: Warren Entsch is bringing in his private members bill, Senator Natasha Stott-Despoya has brought in one to reverse the changes to the Marriage Act, and there seems to be potential for minor backbench revolt in Liberals
CM: I think that it going to take time and I don’t think you should underestimate the conservative rump in the Labor Party as well, they are certainly there, yesterday I noted that Penny Wong if you like paid tribute to her colleagues in the Labor party who hold different views and I just couldn’t understand why she pandered to an element in the Labor Party that apparently support discrimination.
DP: She’s declined to comment on that because its ‘off her portfolio’
CM: Well what nonsense the fact is that what was being proposed was discriminatory, the labor party is supposed to stand for anti discrimination and that’s the whole thing about it and I understand that’s why the Labor Party didn’t have a conscience vote on it, because it was a principle of discrimination, but look at what happened when we moved for women’s reproductive rights and the support of the millennium goal in regard to the education and empowerment of women, that the labor party folded on that, when the national party stood up and said they were going to oppose it, the labor party folded on it as well, and that was because of this conservative group in the labor party, so we shouldn’t underestimate the fact that they’re there.
Nevertheless I think there is . . ….I’ve been despondent for some years about the lack of activism in the Australian community in the face of what Howard has done to Australia, and you know it’s unthinkable ten years ago that you could have had a situation where you could excise the whole country from refugee laws and you wouldn’t have people marching all over the place, or you introduce the idea of becoming part of Bush’s nuclear club, and that’s just happened. Then they change the electoral laws to stop young people enrolling, you know, to cut them out of the process. Wherever you look it happens every day and I think that’s because – one of the reasons we’re not seeing protest is because people are exhausted by the aggressiveness of the radical change to Australian society that Howard has brought about..
But what I’m seeing in this last couple of months is a resurgence, there’s a growing movement in the universities around the nuclear issue, and the refugee campaign, and civil unions is part of the same sort of resurgence, or people saying we have had enough we’re not going to stomach this any more, and its going to the heart of everything we believe in and that’s why I’m trying to make people see that these things ought not to be seen as individual sorts of ‘silo’ issues, but they are the same issue, whether we’re talking about the West Papuans or we’re talking about civil unions, we are talking about a government which is not inclusive and is trying to exclude people from being part of Australian society, and which is unfair and discriminatory.
DP: Isn’t that part of salami tactics, splitting people up so they’re easier to pick off one by on?
CM: Yes, but at least there’s starting to be a resurgence and I take great heart from that and I’m certainly … my whole focus now is to try to get the community to see that whatever happens after the next federal election in terms of the lower house, that the government loses its majority in the Senate and the greens will certainly be campaigning to try to get control of the Senate, and this is where Victoria is critical because at the last federal election it was the labor party in Victoria that preferences family first ahead of the greens, and had not happened, we’d have had David Ristrom there yesterday instead of Steve Fielding.
Labor Party people in Victoria must vote below the line if labor does it again.
DP: The Victorian Gay and Lesbian Rights Lobby say they’ve had the greatest surge in interest they’ve seen for years.
CM: That’s happening around the refugee issue, the anti-nuclear campaigns, I’m sensing it everywhere I go. There are always tipping points, and you can never know when you’ve actually reached them , you just campaign and campaign and then suddenly something happens and the community galvanizes and I can see that happening all around Australia, and that gives me great hope for next year.
DP: I was in England when Thatcher fell, and I’m starting to catch a whiff of the same thing here. I’m starting to see cracks in the façade, Howard’s own party getting fractious with their own leadership, discontent with people within the party being silenced….as well as external dislike of the government beginning to boil up. It feels like the end days of Thatcher.
CM: We shall see and I hope you’re right, I do sense there’s a change on and I do hope its as profound as that.
Australians are beginning to sense that Howards relationship with Bush, and his attempt to activate the Christian conservatives to keep Bush in the White House and the conservatives in power here, the pandering to Indonesia – people are getting really sick of him selling out the country, selling out what we believe in.
An edited version of this interview appeared in the Melbourne Star 22nd June
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