Equality, respect and tolerance: The Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Amendment Bill 2016

Ms PATTEN (Northern Metropolitan) — Talk about wasting time! Mr Finn, who spoke against the Births, Deaths and Marriages Registration Amendment Bill 2016, spent 15 minutes with nonsensical arguments and imaginary hypotheses. He was dismissing real people. This bill is about real people, and I would be happy to introduce Mr Finn to them. This bill is important for compassionate people. If I was a Christian, I would be asking, ‘What would Jesus do?’. I think that Jesus would actually be far more compassionate than the evangelical Christian who just left the room, as in Mr Finn.

I am not going to restate the purposes of this bill, because many have already done that. It is a very simple bill. I have a longstanding position — and I think a lot of us do — around equality, respect and tolerance. I support greater equality for my lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual and intersex friends and our community. It is central to my party’s, the Australian Sex Party’s, policy plank. We support a strong suite of LGBTI-specific policies. This bill is so important. The fact is that the opposition is opposing this bill and yet it has 12 speakers who will talk about how nonsensical and irrelevant this bill is to the general population, and they will speak for 3 or 4 hours on it.

We know that the statistics about the trans community and gender diverse people are there. They face disproportionately high rates of violence, harassment, bullying and exclusion, and it is the words that I have heard from the opposition that cause that. There is just no other reason than gender identity for 66 per cent of young people having experienced verbal abuse and 20 per cent having experienced physical abuse, according to human rights commission surveys. This abuse has been around their gender identity. I have highlighted many times in this chamber that it is horrifying that, as a consequence of this harassment, people identifying as LGBTI are 14 times more likely to attempt suicide than people who identify as heterosexual. This bill goes some way towards addressing the harassment that many intersex, trans and gender diverse people face every day.

Sadly for young people school is the place where most homophobic and transphobic bullying takes place. Almost 6 in every 100 students are gender diverse, trans or intersex. We need to protect them, and this bill goes some way to doing that. It is why the Safe Schools program is so important and why I was very pleased to read — and I am sad Mr Finn is not here to listen to this — the Salvation Army’s response to Safe Schools. This was just the other week, on 15 November 2016.

I quote Salvation Army Victoria state council chair, Major Dr Geoff Webb, who said:

The Salvation Army’s Victoria State Council … has been aware of the negative claims about the Safe Schools program and its related materials but believes these to be unfounded.

And that:

None of the negative claims made about the program accurately reflect anything in the official materials reviewed.

Mrs Peulich — On a point of order, Deputy President, Ms Patten is quoting from a document which has been superseded, and I believe that the Salvation Army would wish for its correct position to be stated on record rather than being misrepresented, as she is currently doing.

Ms PATTEN — On the point of order, Deputy President, I am quoting directly from the Salvation Army’s response to the Safe Schools program on 15 November 2016. I am more than happy to provide Hansard with the documentation.

Honourable members interjecting.

The DEPUTY PRESIDENT — Order! There is no point of order.

Ms PATTEN — Where many Christian organisations have spoken against the Safe Schools program without valid foundation, I commend the Salvation Army for seeing through the rhetoric and taking a commonsense approach that supports equality for LGBTI Victorians. Creating a fairer Victoria by reducing discrimination and respecting diversity is important, and this bill does exactly that. This bill is a compassionate bill. This bill recognises the diversity in our community. This bill recognises the harassment, the bullying and the violence that many of our trans, intersex and gender diverse people experience.

My constituent Dymphna wrote to me in support of this bill:

This bill is important to me because trans, gender diverse and intersex people currently face discrimination and barriers to accessing services when the sex on our ID doesn’t match what we look like and how we live our lives.

I believe all Victorians should be able to have our true sex or gender reflected on legal documents like a birth certificate —

that is, to represent and reflect how they live their lives. Liberals should be supporting people to live their lives as they wish. We should not be interfering with how people wish to live their lives, and this bill assists us in allowing those people to live how they want to live their lives.

I must say I listened to Mr Davis today, and I was really looking forward to him indicating that he would cross the floor on this bill. I was certain that he and Ms Wooldridge would be standing up here, after all of the public comments they have made around transgender discrimination and the support they have given to the LGBTI community. When they were ministers, they were fully supportive. I would like to remind Ms Wooldridge of what she said when launching No To Homophobia, which was an advertisement campaign in partnership with Transgender Victoria and others. She said:

… I hope these advertisements contribute to frank and widespread conversations about what is required to ensure that all Victorians can participate in our society equally and with confidence.

Mr Davis, when Transgender Victoria and YGender launched What Makes an Ally?, raised the transgender flag at Wyndham City Council and said these words:

Poorer mental health and wellbeing is caused by stigma, bullying, rejection by family and friends and difficulties associated with transitioning —

difficulties, Mr Davis, that this bill would help address. He went on to say:

It’s very clear that transgender people may well feel isolated and this brings people together. It’s an opportunity for people to make friendships and to make connections in a safe way, in a way that will improve their health.

There he was supporting our transgender community, our transgender friends. Then today, not a word. He deserted them, as we have seen with the opposition. I was very saddened to see that.

In government this opposition launched the LGBTI health and wellbeing action plan for 2014–18. As far as I know, this is 2016, so we should still be within that plan. Mr Davis said:

The LGBTI health and wellbeing action plan … recognises that the LGBTI community, in general, has poorer health and wellbeing than other Victorians in key areas, largely resulting from stigma and discrimination.

This bill goes towards addressing those issues. This bill goes towards addressing the stigma and discrimination that the LGBTI and particularly the trans, intersex and gender diverse communities are experiencing. Ms Wooldridge echoed Mr Davis, praising Victoria’s reputation as an inclusive state. Ms Wooldridge said:

We all want communities who are resilient and who have good mental health, with freedom from harassment and violence, and who feel supported to access health services that are welcoming and sensitive to their needs.

This bill would help to address that.

I cannot help but notice that there is a really shameful gap between those words and the words that I have heard from the opposition, not just in this house but in the other house. They are the hateful words that will only go to furthering discrimination and stigma, that will result in violence and that will result in people dying. If we truly believe that all Victorians should participate in our society equally, then I would suggest the right thing to do is to support this bill. The bill accords with the recommendations of the Australian Human Rights Commission from 2010, ultimately adopted by a Liberal Australian federal government — that is right, I think it might have been former Prime Minister Tony Abbott who helped us to get passports in which people could identify themselves as the sex that they lived by. They do not need to have surgery to identify themselves as the sex that they live by. The Australian government’s guidelines on the recognition of sex and gender, updated as recently as last year by a coalition government, state that:

Sex reassignment surgery and/or hormone therapy are not prerequisites for the recognition of a change of gender in Australian government records.

They are not prerequisites for the recognition of a change of gender in Australian government records, and that was written by a coalition government. The fact that the Victorian opposition takes a position contrary to its own federal coalition’s policy is quite frankly more than saddening, as is the fact that Mr Finn said that this is nonsense and asked why we are wasting our time, when the coalition’s counterparts at the federal level saw the importance of allowing people to live their lives as they wish. Trans, gender diverse and intersex people face barriers in their daily lives because they are unable to alter the sex recorded on their birth certificate. As a result they will often receive inappropriate and intrusive questions, which is not even to count what they have heard in this house. I am so ashamed of what we and our colleagues have said in this house.

I am saddened and I am ashamed of the intolerance that we have heard in this house and of the disregard for people’s wellbeing that we have heard in this house because people here do not support a bill that allows people to alter the sex recorded on their birth certificate — their birth certificate. Not Mr Finn’s birth certificate and not the birth certificate of Mr Clark in the other house — their birth certificate.

The horrible, horrible disregard that we have seen for our community is shameful. I hope that Mr Davis is listening now and I hope that Ms Wooldridge is listening now, because I hope that they are feeling awful. I feel that they may, when we come to a vote, actually find their conscience and cross the floor. I would hope actually that a number of members here will cross the floor, knowing the importance of this bill to a number of people. I would hope that the Christians in this house will show the compassion that they preach.

Mrs Peulich — When have you cared about what Christians think?

Ms PATTEN — I would hope that the Christians in this house, with the exception of Mrs Peulich, who I have never heard preach any compassion for anything, and those who preach compassion do cross the floor, support this and stop disregarding people who would be negatively affected by this bill not passing.

In other circumstances you would write something like this off, but when I know that there are lives that this bill affects and there are lives that you are affecting by not supporting this bill, I am almost at a loss for words, which is lucky because I am finishing up. This is a very meaningful step on the path to equality, and I would hope that the opposition and my fellow crossbenchers understand that this is not something that you play politics with. This is about people’s lives, so you do not play politics with this. You do not play political tactics with this bill. This is about people’s lives. Maybe it is not going to affect you, but it will affect someone you love, it will affect the family of someone you love and it will affect someone in your community. Even way out west where Mr Finn lives, this bill will affect people. I fully support this bill, and I hope that people with a conscience will support it as well.