Delayed Marriage Equality in Australia

Document Type:Research Paper

Subject Area:Law

Document 1

The pressure for marriage equality has been prioritized politically for the last three consecutive years. However, according to the previous argument by Cadwallader and Riggs, the emphasizes put on marriage equality depend on a very narrow agenda supported by certain people belonging to LGBT community, and it falls to encompass the diverse relation and experience of such people (Riggs and Cadwallader, 2012). According to the report by CNN, Australia is on the verge of legalizing marriage equality. Report by ABS (Australian Bureau of Statistics) shows that close to 62% of country’s population voted for legalization of same-sex marriage as part and parcel of a national survey. The task was now left to the Australian parliament to debate on how to transform the peoples’ opinion to law, but the process has been complicated.

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However, latest poll opinion conducted in August 2017 reported that 62% of the participants supported the issue, 32% were not for the idea, and the remaining 6% was undecided as shown in the following diagram. Factors resulting to prolonged adoption of Marriage equality The prolonged adoption of marriage equality in Australia is linked to politics. During 2004, John Howard amended the Marriage Bill to help in clarifying the exact description of marriage as “the union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others. ” Since that time, the debate to legalize marriage equality in Australia has delayed, but no government has ever been committed to amending it. In 2013, Tony Abbott became the prime minister of Australia and killed all hopes of marriage equality during his leadership period.

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” This is to mean that electorates with significant opposition to the marriage equality provide the majority of their duo party vote to the coalition. The ones with insignificant opposition had a higher likelihood of voting Labor(Alcorn, 2017). It is not difficult to determine the reason that makes coalition so divided on the issue of equality-most of its support especially in the country and among older opinions and group of people with firm religious affiliations posses reservations though they have gone down with time. Similarly, Labor has also been torn apart considering its connection with Catholic beliefs and because foreigners supporting the ALP may end up becoming conservative concerning the same issue. Jason’s electorate is on the list of the ten seats that portray high opposition to marriage equality.

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It needs to be much higher (on average) for Coalition MPs. There needs to be overwhelming support before their MPs are prepared to move away from the status quo bias. ”Research conducted shows that parliamentarians representing members where resistance to marriage equality was approximately 40% would still keep on opposing the law amendment. It is only one time when resistance against marriage equality reduced below 30% when the possibility of Coalition member of parliament opposing the amendment of marriage laws declined below 50% and just by an insignificant margin. It is a logic that shows why a lot of Coalition MPs in prominent towns representing learned electorates, like Malcolm Turnbull do not oppose marriage equality(Ben Westcott, 2017). Delegates such as MP Tony Burke who voted against the issue in 2012 now supports the idea together with Jason Clare from Labor party who admitted to having changed his mind.

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