This Way Out - Australia’s 5th Marriage Equality Anniversary
AUSTRALIA’s first gay and lesbian legally married couples are celebrating their fifth anniversaries in January 2024. Of course, the march down the politically-fraught aisle was long and hard. The conservative agenda of Prime Minister John Howard’s Liberal Party saw making the civil institution explicitly heterosexual as a priority, and passed an amendment to the Marriage Act in 2004. Over the next thirteen years, 22 attempts to overturn that law in Parliament failed, while public support for marriage equality grew. Still, the administration of then-Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull opted for a non-compulsory, non-binding mail-in postal vote on the issue. The turning point came in August of 2017. That’s when “This Way Out” SYDNEY correspondent BARRY McKAY picks up the story.
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