While Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek are busy trying to win the fictitious war of the gender wage gap, Labor candidate for Wentworth Tim Murray has said the Labor Party will install a full-time commissioner to deal with LGBTI discrimination complaints.
“We may have won marriage equality but we’ve got more things to win,” Murray said on Facebook. “In our Human Rights Commission, we need a full-time commissioner to look after LGBTI discrimination. The Labor Party will deliver that to you. The Liberal Party will not.”
“We need to restore the funding to AIDS,” Murray added. “$53 million has been taken out of AIDS funding by the Liberal Party. The Labor Party will give it back to you.”
Earlier this month, Mark Powell warned: “Of even greater concern is Bill Shorten’s promise that—if elected—he will commit $1.4 million to establishing an LGBTIQ watchdog. The commissioner’s (or should that be ‘commissars’?) role in this body will be to champion particular minority-groups. What’s more, Penny Wong has explained that, ‘The commissioner will address structural discrimination, work towards ensuring our schools, workplaces, and communities are free from discrimination.’”
It always was about more than just marriage. As Paul Murray, an advocate for same-sex marriage conceded, “It wasn’t just about a vote about marriage. In fact, it would be about rolling back the way the system currently works for religious organisations to decide whether or not they can hire people based on their sexuality, whether they can decide to marry people based on their sexuality. Because as we speak there is a review going on to religious freedom…”
“The very same group who argued for YES, who told us the whole way through that it was going to be nothing other than a change of YES. The very same people, the very same organisations, are now arguing for religious protections that already exist, not new ones, not extra ones, the ones that currently exist should all be blown up.”
To many, this is no new revelation either. In 2012 Marsha Gessen, the lesbian political activist, told the Sydney Writer’s Festival: “Fighting for gay marriage generally involves lying about what we are going to do with marriage when we get there. Because we lie that the institution of marriage is not going to change. And that is a lie.”
