At its conference last week, the ALP endorsed national legislation
which [would] allow same-sex couples to register their relationship and secure legal recognition of their relationship in areas such as property rights and superannuation benefits.
As usual, the idea did not please everyone:
The national secretary of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association, Joe de Bruyn, said the Tasmanian scheme [on which the policy is modelled] gave same-sex couples the same status as married couples, which would demean and undermine marriage. …
He said the policy would be poorly received in suburban Australia and would make it harder for the Opposition Leader, Kevin Rudd, to win the 16 seats that Labor needed to defeat the Howard Government.
We’ve discussed the rather difficult-to-detect logic of the first claim before, and some newly unembargoed questions from the Australian Survey of Social Attitudes 2005 enable us to consider the second, at least if we consider it a near-equivalent to civil unions.
The overall result, with 48% of respondents being in favour of civil unions, was consistent with two other polls on the issue, which registered 45% and 52% support. As is common with questions on this subject, there was a big ‘neither agree nor disagree’ response of 19%, suggesting that this is still an open debate for many people. A third are opposed to civil unions.
Breaking down the results by other variables, we find that 52% of Labor voters support civil unions, compared to 45% of Liberal voters. Most in favour were Green voters (82%), least in favour Family First voters (26%). Among occupational groups, professionals were most in favour (64%), tradespersons least in favour (36%), probably reflecting in part the usual male (40% support) / female (56%) divide on sexuality issues. Mr de Bruyn’s shop assistant members were 53% in favour, 32% against, possibly reflecting male/female differences in the other direction.
As Fred Argy suggested in comments on the gay neighbours post, religion helps explain these attitudes – 42% of those who say they have a religion are in favour of civil unions, but 66% of those who say they do not. As we would expect, frequency of attending religious services is also important, with only a quarter of those who attend weekly favouring civil unions but over half of those attending once a year.
The only potentially troublesome group I can see for Labor are male, working-class voters who have defected to the Coalition before. But some of them are likely to be won-over by Labor’s industrial relations policies. And it is unlikely that the Coalition will make much of this issue, as its own support base is more in favour than against.
Andrew Norton 
Andrew, I doubt that this will affect the ALP vote much, except perhaps at the margins (maybe amongst conservative christians). People’s minds are on much bigger issues this election. I’d suspect that IR and economic issues will be more important in most male working-class voters than any potential legislation on same-sex relationships, which in any event already exists in Tasmania.
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I think I read somewhere that Tasmania’s scheme now has a large majority in favor, in Tasmania. If that’s true it suggests that once the scheme is tried most people are happy with it. The ALP should point that out if its policy is criticised.
It looks like the environment / nuclear is going to be a much bigger issue. Andrew, do you think people will reduce their concern with a policy a party might have, if they have strong support for one of their other policies? So that if they find they have strong support for the ALP’s environment policies they might not place as much importance on their dislike of these Tasmanian arrangements?
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Russell – So many issues, but only two votes (H of R and Senate). It’s hard to imagine too many people being strongly influenced by this one. I’d be a bit surprised if nuclear energy had much impact either.
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I’ve noticed that nuclear power is a very big issue for some people (some are very passionate about it) and almost non-existent for others. I would be surprised if nuclear power moved many votes on a two-party preferred basis from labor to liberal or vice versa. It may move some voters to the Greens, which would be important in the Senate.
Some of my science-educated friends who are in favour of considering nuclear power are disappointed with Labor’s attitude to it, and they are slightly less inclined to support the ALP because of this.
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Howard and Rudd do look alike on many issues, so clear differences on important issues will be important. Howard looks very out of touch on the environment (and ‘out of touch’ will be Labor’s theme), and the clearest example of his going down the wrong road with environmental policy is his enthusiasm for nuclear and dismissal of renewables. The ALP will really play this up: what will a nuclear reactor in the vicinity do for your property values etc
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Sacha – you don’t think it’s a good ‘doctor’s wives’ issue, now that David Hicks has been neutralised?
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Where have Sinclair’s recent comments gone?
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It may be a `doctor’s wives’ issue – but then again, many people support nuclear power for what they think are good, well-thought-out reasons. Those who don’t support it outnumber those who do (according to recent polls from memory), but it’s not something on which there is an absolutely overwhelming view by almost all people one way or the other.
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I must have been going to a cached page – refreshed the page and Sinclair’s comments were there (I can hear those Christian Brothers spinning in their graves: “civic duty” indeed!)
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Russell – you’re on the wrong page 🙂 but we knew that already. Yes, civic duty, I deeply hurt by all these dismissive comments about my community spirit.
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If Australia does go down the path of registered relationships for gays, isn’t it about time that we had a re-think about the laws regarding heterosexual de facto relationships, at least as far as they relate to benefits? My concern about this has long been that whether a de facto relationship exists or not in some cases is very hard to know. The best anyone can do is look at a number of factors which may, or may not, when taken into total consideration, mean that a court or government department may consider it a df relationshio. It seems an area of law where lawyers and citizens have to live with a high degree of uncertainty.
Secondly, it used to be that people had an option of either entering into the consequences of marriage deliberately, with the consequences for property on separation, or marrying and having those consequences known. But laws removed that option and said that no one can avoid property splitting if it is a df relationship (with its ill defined definition.)
Family law has recently been amended so that even married persons can now enter agreements which in most case will be binding for a property split, so even within the scope of marriage people can control their rights. (De facto couples can do that to in Qld, too, but as I say, it may be that some de factos don’t even know that they are technically in a de facto relationship and may not realise the legistlation applies to them.)
What I am suggesting is that it would seem to me to save a lot of uncertainty if heterosexuals also had to register their relationships to get the benefits – hey it’s called civil marriage, what a radical idea!
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“Russell – you’re on the wrong page” – so twentieth century Sinclair, and quite inappropriate given the topic of this thread. You’re now supposed to say “… on a different page”.
“some de factos don’t even know that they are technically in a de facto relationship and may not realise the legislation applies to them.)” I remember telling a friend of mine who is in a de facto relationship that to all intents and purposes the law regarded her as married to ‘the boyfriend’ – she went and checked the law and was horrified, she emailed me back “The state has married me off and not even told me…”
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Russell, I’m not a wishy-washy type. ‘Wrong’ and ‘different’ have very different meanings. One involves a value-judgement, the other does not. (I prefer the 18 century to the twentieth).
Having said that I agree with Russell’s point. That is a great line, “The state has married me off”.
If marriage were the sacrocant institution that the anti-same sex couple lobby maintained, they would argue against de facto provisions of the law, they’d bring back ‘at fault’ divorce, recriminilise adultry, etc.
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Steve,
I think the problem with heterosexual relationships is that you can lose benefits in some circumstances compared to being single (like unemployment) — so if you were in one of these situations, it would be stupid to register. I presume this is why the government has obscure rules about classifying people as in a relationship. I think the solution is to change partners every year and half or so.
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Yes, Conrad, I meant to point out that I was aware of the government’s interest in some cases of recognizing a relationship, whether or not the partners want it recognized. But doesn’t recognition carry some benefits as well as some penalities, and I wonder how big the net loss might be for the government if you did insist on “registration” or marriage before the status is recognised.
The only people I can see disadvantaged would be those who are not yet divorced but living with someone else. As the fastest you can get divorced is about 15 months, maybe that is reason to let them register without calling it marriage. Certainly, this idea re-introduces more certainly into society, which I thought was the whole point of secular civil marriage in the first place.
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Steve,
the recognition carries benefits (?), like property rights, family tax benefits etc. The loss to the governement is obviously the amount of benefits that it doesn’t pay now that it would have to, and differences in tax takes based on combined family incomes versus two separate ones.
Actually, as far as I’m concerned, the government should have no role in determining how people classify their relationships — it should just treat people as individuals, although this isn’t even slightly possible at all under the current system. This way we could delete the government from the mess which it has created, and wouldn’t need to worry about being registered by default, registering, who is allowed to marry people, etc.
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“I prefer the 18 century to the twentieth” – sounds like Jesuits! are you sure it was a Christian Brothers school? The Christian Brothers could always be relied upon to belt 19th c. Catholic teaching into boys.
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Adam Smith is very definitely 18 century. Mind you the twentieth had Hayek. Not being Catholic allowed me to avoid Catholic (explicit) teaching, those who were had to endure the 1960s Vatican Two document. Of course by South African standards the Christian Brothers were considered enlighted progressives.
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Steve,
I think it’s pretty fair to say that being in a recognised heterosexual relationship only confers penalties for Social Security Act purposes. The only benefit that springs to mind is bereavement payments, but given that one of you has to die to get it, I’m not much moved.
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What Joe de Bruyn’s (and Senator Helen Polley’s) speeches show is that there’s a huge range of views in the ALP on all sorts of topics. For some reason, “marriage” seems to be an emotional lightning rod.
It is clear that the coalition’s bill before the last election restating that marriage was between a man and a woman, while having no practical effect on who could get married, was a signal to social conservatives that the coalition held similarly social conservative values. I bet that the federal government’s dragging feet response to Warren Entsch’s “bill” to remove distinctions in commonwealth legislation between heterosexual and homosexual relationships (apart from marriage) is about appealing (or not being unappealing) to socially conservative voters.
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