And Another Thing . . . .

This article first appeared in Sunday Life on November 8, 2004

Dear, dear! How queer everything is today! And yesterday things went on just as usual. I wonder if I've been changed in the night? Let me think: was I the same when I got up this morning? I almost think I can remember feeling a little different. I know just how Alice (in Wonderland) feels, although, of course, it is not the world that has become queer. It is me. And politics in Australia has moved so rapidly to the right that, like Alice, I can only peer down an ever-extending tunnel as both major parties race out of sight and everything shifts and changes shape around me.

Not long before the campaign leading up to last month's election, I was driving home listening to PM on Radio National. Labor's then legal affairs spokeswoman, Nicola Roxon, was reiterating the party's position on gay marriage: that it supported the institution of marriage as an important social & and for many, religious union between a man and a woman. She went on to state, to rousing parliamentary applause, that she knew Australians would welcome this. Suddenly, it occurred to me that despite having been born in Melbourne 40 years ago, I was no longer considered Australian. Many of my friends were no longer considered Australian.

Meanwhile, over at the Australian Democrats office a deal was being done to give their preferences to Family First (a party affiliated with the Assemblies of God) who in turn were going to preference Liberals unless they were lesbians like Dr Ingrid Tall. During the election campaign a Family First worker had to be disciplined for agreeing that the party supported lesbians being burned to death. (I didn't make up that last detail. Believe me, I wish I had). The ALP too passed on their preferences to Family First before the Greens. The results of all this wheeling and dealing is that Family First now have a Victorian Senate seat despite only receiving 1.9 % of the vote in that state. The Greens, who recieved 8.64 % of the vote in Victoria, do not. Preferencing also meant that Family First almost beat the Greens in Tasmania though they only polled a bit over 2 % to over 13% for the Greens. That's democracy for you.

Perhaps we could call this free trade? As well as importing baseball hats, sitcoms and Top-40 hits, we get a war in Iraq and the growing influence of evangelical Christians on our political culture. Another favourite of mine are the Saltshakers, the right-wing Melbourne-based Christian group that lobbied companies such as Just Jeans and Roche to pull television advertising during The L Word (a kind of lesbian Melrose Place) earlier this year. Groups like this manage to make Play School seem perverted – there's a bear in there and a lesbian as well, and claim to be outraged about the idea that a child might have two mummies.

Given that numerous studies suggest there is an increased suicide risk among gay teenagers, presumably because they are frightened and ashamed of people's reaction, I find it distressing that these lobby groups insist that it is being gay that is dangerous rather than the homophobia they peddle.

Of course, I am ignoring what really upsets them: sex. Most religious groups love to refer to the relentless sexual activity of gays and lesbians in an attempt to rouse community disgust. Melbourne writer Helen Razer has pointed out that there tends to be more references to oral sex in an episode of the hetero Footy Show than on the homo L Word. And has anyone noticed that the Government only allows the church to set the agenda when it suits them? Certainly those members of the church who have protested about human rights abuses in our treatment of refugees were told to mind their own business.

Last month, I watched Gough Whitlam watch Mark Latham concede defeat and John Howard welcome in a fourth term. I have stood on the same spot, politically speaking, for the past 30 years so how is it that I find myself increasingly in a radical, sorry, kooky, minority? How is it that notions such as compassion and inclusion have become laughable and naive rather than being seen as the strong qualities they are?

But hey, I'll cry at anything. I cry whenever I hear Whitlam's now-famous speech, first made in 1972 when the phrase 'men and women of Australia' was intended to address everyone who lived in this land. Australians were offered a choice between the habits and fears of the past, and the demands and opportunities of the future. We now live in a time when fear, and the cultivation of it, has become the way of the future. How queer everything is today.

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