BILL SHORTEN & I

READING DAVID MARR'S QUARTERLY ESSAY ABOUT LABOR LEADER
BILL SHORTEN - FACTION MAN 

I spent the late teenage years in suburban Melbourne transitioning from Pom to Australian citizen, which is why I liked reading about the Labor Leader Bill Shorten's formative years.

I WANT TO LIKE HIM. David Marr says Shorten scored Brownie Points for his rapport and recruitment of young people at Monash University. 
The energy and idealism of youth, yes! I was a Pied Piper too - at school was voted Student Rep and organiser for live bands and discos!
While Bill was recruiting a new generation of ALP members and attracting Prominent and Influential Party figures to his fundraising events, I was a new Australian oblivious to all which wasn't in front of me...I booked La Femme to play Huntingdale High in 1980 after seeing them perform in Melbourne's thriving new wave/ pub /music scene(no ID then).

ACTU President Bob Hawke wanted to be my man too, as I was turning 18 and could vote for the first time.

1982 was a defining year - suffering from undiagnosed Depression, I left an office job which I thought was killing my soul. 
My tears of despair at hearing it would take 6 weeks to receive the dole, created compassion in the Centrelink officer and I kept a roof over my head.

I heard the call to action by Bob Hawke. His message was hopefull, but I was turned away as I hadn't registered to vote! Nobody had told me, but I still had some benefit from a Labor Government in the Commonwealth Employment Scheme.

THE BUZZ WORD OF THE 1980'S - NETWORK! 

On the tight-rope of a fringe existence in St.Kilda I was attracted to a theatre poster which led me into helping form a Youth Arts component of Fringe Network, 
a resource for artists.

IDENITITY POLITICS AS MELOURNE FRINGE

Based in Brunswick St. Fitzroy the C.E.P. provided 6 month wages, and sent off to learn how to touch-type!

Brunswick St Fitzroy

I was flying high as Fringe Network Secretary/Board Director/Arts administrator and Festival Programmer and Performance Poet!


Shorten created NETWORK too, a youth faction of Young Labor at Monash. 

ALL THAT GLITTERS IN THE IRISH DNA from the Goldfields of Ballarat to the Coal Mines of Ipswich.
I met my husband at the first Melbourne Fringe Festival of 1983 and we became Partners in Puppetry. link here:

When Premier Joh and his cronies had left main stage in Queensland and Wayne Goss was the Labor man in charge we headed North for health and economic prospects. We felt at home in working-class Ipswich, but moved out into the Brisbane Valley because Roy wanted to plant trees.

THEN, Pauline Hanson scared us....We had to do our bit to fight Racism and Right wing haranguing by force of Reason and Humanism.

Something which was a revelation was ALP/DLP history. Many local branch ALP members were Roman Catholics like Bill Shorten. 
I went to Frank Hardy's Power without Glory for a literary summary of those post-war clashing of ideologies!

Bill's often going on about talking up Labor values for working people/families, but I was always puzzled by the Party not winning the participation of Unemployed workers.

Treasurer Wayne Swann ruled out the unemployed getting an extra $50.00 per week and Bill doesn't see that social democracy means building the party with victims of the worst of Capitalism.


Journalist David Marr opens his essay with the most important word in Politics, The Numbers.

I wouldn't read Machievelli's The Prince until Tory Tony Abbott became Prime Minister so now as I read the Quarterly Essay I wonder if  Leader of the Opposition Shorten has a knot of guilt about anything, and I guess that's what the Royal Commission into Trade Unions has been trying to find out with $80million of tax-payers money for Tory Tony's dirty digging.

How corrupted does an M.P's Conscience get?

If the means justify the ends, the silence by The Left and Right of the ALP on human rights violations towards asyslum seekers is abhorrent.
 Australia's Immigration "Border Force" actions and contracted Security operators off-shore detention behaviour is something they can live with for the pay packet, power and privileges, from Superannuation to gifting each other thousands of dollars for each others campaigns.
 Silence is sinister not golden.

Right Faction Labor man Bill Shorten with a Docklands political pedigree has been given the schooling and entre to the business networks via Unions and marriage.

 Becoming a Friend of Israel is something I didn't learn about in the elective of HSC Politics. but I have learned about it via observations with my local MP Shayne Neumann when he was part of a debate about ALP policy on Palestine.

What does it take to be a Politician? And to what end do you use the Power for?
Shayne Neumann MP for Blair and Bill Shorten MP in Ipswich Queensland during a Flood Insurance Inquiry.

Kurt Vonnegut  author of God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (aka Pearls Before Swine), wasn't on my reading list either. My husband has read widely and offered this relevant to our understanding.

“The what?”

The Money River, where the wealth of the nation flows. We were born on the banks of it. We can slurp from that mighty river to our hearts’ content. And we even take slurping lessons, so we can slurp more efficiently.

“Slurping lessons?”

From lawyers! From tax consultants! We’re born close enough to the river to drown ourselves and the next ten generations in wealth, simply using dippers and buckets. But we still hire the experts to teach us the use of aqueducts, dams, reservoirs, siphons, bucket brigades, and the Archimedes’ screw. And our teachers in turn become rich, and their children become buyers of lessons in slurping.

“It’s still possible for an American to make a fortune on his own.”

Sure—provided somebody tells him when he’s young enough that there is a Money River, that there’s nothing fair about it, that he had damn well better forget about hard work and the merit system and honesty and all that crap, and get to where the river is. ‘Go where the rich and powerful are,’ I’d tell him, ‘and learn their ways. They can be flattered and they can be scared. Please them enormously or scare them enormously, and one moonless night they will put their fingers to their lips, warning you not to make a sound. And they will lead you through the dark to the widest, deepest river of wealth ever known to man. You’ll be shown your place on the riverbank, and handed a bucket all your own. Slurp as much as you want, but try to keep the racket of your slurping down. A poor man might hear.

Another thing Bill Shorten and I have is visiting Victorian State MP for Oakleigh, Race Matthews.
I had been to his office as a 17 year old homeless student in fear I wouldn't be able to stay at school. He put me in touch with a local youth worker and not long after I had a room in a house which supported my Year 12 study.
I would have been a good candidate for being a mere member of the ALP, even to hand me a pamphlet.
Bill Shorten showed more promise. He had formed a 

 In the school holidays I worked with Mum and the middle-aged, menopausal Greek women clocking on already in a sweat! 
Didn't see any Union organisers promising better working conditions in the heat of the metal sheds around Clayton.

Marr shows what a men's club Shorten has risen from.

AFFORDABLE HOUSING & HOMELESSNESS IN THE LUCKY COUNTRY

It was synchronicity. I had been listening to ABC Radio National on the expanding housing crisis faced by my age of 50 + women through lack of structural discriminations over a life-time to find a scarcity of affordable housing.
 clink here for ABC Radio's BACKGROUND BRIEFING LINK   
   

Later I found an email from my Federal M.P.s office announcing the new Parliamentary Secretary for Housing 

and Homelessness, Senator Doug Cameron was coming to town!

Queensland Times 21/8/2013

The Barry Jones Auditorium at the Ipswich Library(opposite the Bill Haydn Centre), had an audience of managers and field- workers from non-government and church run housing and homeless organisations. 

Their questions and petitions reflected a diabolical situation for their clients and workers, especially since the Campbell Newman State Government were sworn in and started pulling apart the glue in the fabric being created by a socially responsible ALP.

Federal money is now propping up people via Centerlink
and community organisations like Tenants Advisory Services because the Queensland Government really is degrading and CUTTING like sociopaths.

Also  attending was a woman who described herself as a Carer to her husband whose mental illness had escalated by the letters they received from the Department since Queensland's Minister for Housing, Tim Mander(of Scripture Union School Chaplain success), started sending requests for them to move out. 

She judged the intent was for the State to disown responsibility for public housing as her neigbouring house was vacated and not replaced with new tenants, but sold.

M.P. Shayne Neumann informed her they were selling houses but not the title so they still had the asset on the books, creating a situation where the purchasers could not gain investments and loans to fulfill their social housing mission, such as Churches of Christ and Salvation Army.

My appeal to N.S.W Senator Cameron in his new role was to consider the situation of vulnerable women my age and over who have no superannuation, brought up kids, had jobs in factories and now feel the ill effects of  osteo-arthritis.

It's on the record that divorce impoverishes women and does not augur well for a decent egalitarian ethic to accept it as their fate in a free market.

My comments resonated with others in the auditorium. Doug tried to suggest it wasn't only a women's issue, but the latest report say it is, after-all, I threatened in my histrionic eloquence, the consequence is a greater burden on society because we women live longer!

Blair ALP members privileged to meet comrade from NSW, Senator Doug Cameron.
Ipswich Metro Hotel for nibbles and responsible drinking.......

P.S. Some notes for ALP Housing campaign: - The Henry Tax Review said Negative Gearing doesn't work - transfer the wealth to invest in social housing infrastructure - compare that to Tony Abbott giving pretty rich maternity payments to professional women to design a baby.

Get some youngsters who want to leave school to get apprenticeships in the building trade - then they can build their own Grand Designs....

GET OUT OF LITTLE SQUARE BOXES - BUILD SOME CURVES WITH FIRE RESISTANT STRAW BALE HOUSING WHERE RENT IS 25 percent of income! 

               1986-1996. AUSTRALIA WAS THE WORKER'S

 & Unemployed Workers PARADISE...for full story press here:

Our life as Australian Puppeteers

House ownership was achievable. Working conditions, entitlements and decent wages are the envy of many people in many countries. With a strong Union/Labor Movement preventing WORKCHOICES under Prime Minister Howard we now prepare for the Tory parties to remove Penalty rates.

WHY DO I CARE?

My husband and I were able to own our house through a Victorian State Government in 1985. The repayments were 25 percent of our unemployment benefit plus CPI.

Getting on the property ladder, even though we had to move out of the city worked well. I didn't drive then, but we lived in the country town of Kyneton, and could push the kids to playgroup, or the G.P. Later they could walk to school and I learned to drive for my 30th birthday so I could have better work opportunities.

We made a profit for a decent deposit for our move to Queensland to try for jobs there...(see Poetry Platter on left)

Even with a $40,000 deposit the major Banks would not give us a home loan to settle in Queensland, when re-payments were less than  market rents! Why? because we were stigmartyred on the dole. 

Today they also turn down applicants because they can't get secure jobs. Life as a casual worker does not give you access to Real Estate. We went back to the State Government for a loan. You could then....

I believe in The Common-wealth re-investing in their people when the worse aspects of capitalism won't  and selfish Tory socially unjust, exclusionary ideologies echo notions of social Darwinism.           
I don't carry a chip on my shoulder, I fly with wings of avenging words, created by injustices.  WHY DO I CARE? 

A newspaper for me - see the side-dish on the left: Ingredients in the Mix for the full story.

I was homeless once upon a time when I had to move out at 16 years old because my parents were a bad alcohol fuelled influence. 
Anxiety about my circumstances as a 17yr girl in the suburbs of Melbourne without a secure, safe place and able to continue schooling, led me to enter the office of the State Member of Parliament, Race Matthews. 
He listened, he knew who to call, and within a day I had a room of my own with a couple who cared. A woman who liked me to read my poems, give me money for the bus so I could complete Year 12.

They received $5.00 a week to assist their expenses, under the Liberal Coalition's Treasurer, John Howard. He was the mean Scrooge. 

Perhaps he believed, like my Dad back in England who voted Conservative welfare spending would encourage a sense of entitlement for at risk teenagers? The uncertainty was "character building..."

What it was, dear reader was more kindling towards mental illness which would debilitate and prevent me from achieving my individual potential.

THE PERSONAL REALLY IS POLITICAL as you can read in my family pedigree living in the slums of Glasgow and Dublin. GENDER EQUALITY IS VITAL BUT SO IS POSITIVE DISCRIMINATION IN POLICIES ON PUBLIC HOUSING - YOU CAN'T TRUST CAPITALISM TO LOOK AFTER YOUR NEEDS AND INTERESTS.

http://julie-mcneill.blogspot.com.au/2011/01/dirty-old-towns-glasgow-and-dublin-1920.html            

   

History in family Her/story can remind you those who have the most of everything don't like to share it with those who have nothing, even for common human decency. 

                                      

  I bet if you reminded the LNP about the history of putting people who can't pay rent into the poor-house they'd take you literally. They'd think it would compliment their Boot Camps... Great Great Grandmother Brothwood had no choice to enter the Wolverhampton Work-House to have a bastard baby in 1867 in the middle of a Cholera epidemic. 

PREVENTION IS BETTER THAN CURE - NO BACKWARD STEPS OR HISTORY REPEATING ITSELF...

WHERE IS TONY ABBOTT'S COALITION HOUSING POLICY?
been looking and googling, can't find it...?

SEPTEMBER 14th 2013 - ALP FOR ME

TRUMPED AGAIN TONY! OUR CLEVER PRIME MINISTER SAYS PUT THIS IN YOUR DIARY & LET'S SEE WHAT YOU'RE REALLY MADE OF...

• I would have had such an idea, dampen the incessant questions from the media about the timing of the next election, and making us all irritable.
• Great for ALP branch members and their M.P.s to plan and prepare the campaign  at the grass roots.
• Her confidence and authority in governing will always put (misogynist) Tony Abbott off-balance. It's not all about the power of testesterone action man for the cameras like the Russian, Putin or the Everyman he claimed to be at the Press Club.

      February will be fun: 

Shayne Neumann M.P.Blair and I
ready to argue the ALP case for continuing Government.

Sunday 17th February is my first date in the diary as a Fifty Year Old local Somerset branch member at the Fernvale Markets, assisting Shayne Neumann M.P.for Blair at his regular gig listening and responding to the people - informing them of the great reforms the Gillard Labor Government has done even with a minority government, and what it wants to fulfill:

Like former Labor Prime Ministers before her who steered our country into a modern, principled nation with Universal Health Care, and free education for working-class kids, our current P.M. is determined to put the National Disability Insurance Scheme next to Medicare so everybody can achieve their potential. A FAIR GO BY FAIRER TAXES PLEASE! It's proved that the rich get richer and the poor get poorer.
Rich business man Dick Smith admitted to broadcaster Philip Adams last year on the ABC that many rich people he knows don't redistribute enough of their wealth to help break down the barriers to wealth creation. 
We will have to wait for the May budget.

Since this, the LNP Government proved what Tories do -

demolish the hope of equity by refusing to participate in
 a Trial of the NDIS

 because they don't see any value in it or us.

If it's all about TRUST Tony - I trust the Independents have found they were wise to go with Julia Gillard to form Government and put her in the Lodge. 

TURN THE SCREWS on the Coalition, JULIA, ever so slowly, as Keating would say! because the Federal LNP would be as short-sighted and discriminatory as Queenslanders have discovered to their dismay.

http://queenslandlabor.org/

SNIPPING THE UMBILICAL CHORD - AUSTRALIA DAY 2012

                                                              HMS ENDEAVOUR 1768

January 26, 2012  My Australia Day?


I am firmer in my conviction; the arrival of Captain Cook and his mapping of the East coast of New Holland in 1770,  the subsequent first landing 26/1/1778 of the First Fleet of convicts and soldiers, and the planting of the Union Jack by Captain Arthur Phillip to show occupation by the British Crown - has never felt right in my citizen bones.


"Australia Day" denies the tragedy and crimes against humanity for the first humans who inhabited this great southern land for over 40,000 years.

To celebrate a National Day which signifies the invasion and destructive force by the British on the indigenous generations is disrespectful and typical of the Conservatism encouraged by the likes of ex-Prime Minister John Howard, with it's Colonial sensibility and jingoism.

How would they like to party on a day when their Ancestors were raped, abducted, shot and thrown in the rivers with the garbage? 
How would they like to party when their grandparents haven't even been paid their life-time of wages yet? Stolen wages


A unifying national day for all citizens can only come on the day Australia becomes a Republic and we fly an Australian flag without the Union Jack dominating the visual symbol of an independent nation(The Republic of Ireland are proud they did it, why can't we?).

BEFORE I joined the Australian Labor Party I was a member of the Australian Republican Movement. 

BEFORE I signed up and paid my small token of support for an Australian Republic I became an AUSTRALIAN CITIZEN - with my husband because when we went to exotic, cheap Bali 1984 on our belated honeymoon(last chance before the baby arrived), the customs officer at Denpasar Airport noticed we didn't have a visa to return home....

We'll be right! we're Australians!  Having arrived in Melbourne, Roy in 1964 and myself in 1978 both 14 years and itching for a more hopeful future life away from our miserable industrial cities of Leeds and Birmingham in the U.K. 

Like so many British people fed up of the freezing weather and crap wages, we assumed we'd been accepted to emigrate after a  2 year process and payment of 13 pounds each -there was nothing else to do. We could vote. 

There must be some mistake we said to the Australian Embassy consul in our bathers and sea-salted spikey hair from a morning on Kuta Beach - No, we have to stamp you a visa in your British Passport or they won't let you back into the country. 

My insides did a somersault, but, but..it was unfathomable to think we could go back to pommie land! We gave her all the memorable arrival details she needed for a speedy temporary visa but suggested we become Australian citizens so we didn't have this trouble again!

You can imagine the pity and deep sense of injustice I feel hearing that people who came here as babies and toddlers are deported and dumped in their country of origin if they have a criminal record. It's almost like a retaliatory policy - Here youse - see how you like having undesirable characters clogging up your penal system! 

RECORDING THE ARRIVAL OF THE BOAT PEOPLE.

Walking with our first generation kiddies through bush on ancient pathways to
NOURLANGIE ROCK PAINTING, Northern Territory, Australian tour 1989. 

The McNeill's from Leeds 1964 - 10 pound poms

(and my future husband has to wait till I grown up being one year old at this time!)

Don't believe everything you read in the newspaper - 
 My mum  had been  in Australia before but not by choice.
This is my Inheritance of 
My Mum's Australian story

AUSTRALIA DAY WEEKEND 1984

My husband and I had decided to get married on the Australia Day weekend in 1984. It sounded symbolic to the fact that we two poms had found each other all the way over  in  Australia. I had always thought I'd marry an Aussie, but when Roy and I started talking we had so much in common - we spoke and got each others jokes and ironies - and we'd both thought at a stage in our lives we  would go back to England to fight in a revolution!


I'd kissed a Greek-Australian, an Indian-Australian, Italian-Australian, Hungarian-Australian, and a a few Anglo-Celtic Aussies before I met my match along the winding tracks and detours of young adulthood.

                                            CHEERS TO THE COMMON-WEALTH OF THE ALL THE  PEOPLE!

OATH OF CITIZENSHIP - CITY OF FITZROY,  VICTORIA 1985  


In Melbourne, we sat with the public servant as he ticked all the boxes and then said we had a choice when speaking the oath: renounce all other allegiances by Almighty God and the Queen, and her Heir and Successors etc etc 


I was stunned - I don't believe in God. 
That's alright - you can do the pledge of allegiance only to the Queen.
I'm not a Monarchist! I'm here to pledge loyalty to Australia!


Dear Reader, I had to be pragmatic -  be disappointed in saying an Oath I didn't fully believe in in order to secure our residence in Australia and being with our Aussie kids.


1993
It took the election of the Australian Labor Party with Paul Keating as Prime Minister to remove references to the Queen from the Oath of Citizenship.
Bloody Oath - It matters to me what I say is True, not make a liar of me.

1996                                             Brisbane Valley Times

BIG TICK on my step towards signing up: ALP
NATIONAL PLATFORM - CHAPTER 11 - 3. Since its earliest days, Labor has fought to strengthen our democracy. Our vision today includes our commitment to create a modern federation and to take to a national referendum a vote on Australia becoming a republic.

2011 = THE ROYAL VISIT - HELLO & GOODBYE

She's a Solar Queen - Xmas gift from quirky Lance,

now standing happily in front of the Pineapple plant, Queensland -

 collecting solar energy in her handbag to wave irreverently!

I'm so patriotic I want to contribute this Australia Day politically personal poem: 

CITIZEN NOT SUBJECT

 George wept losing America, but 
Cheered up, when another wealth to share

Was claimed with convict imprints.


 Ship-owners wooed Westminster with
Trade not war, me old China, and
More Slave trading, sugar and spice, 
Silks for Aristocrats on the way back from
New South Wales.


With plenty of money and supply of

Cheap labourers to work for the love of it

 On Churches and Stately Homes - 

 Twas  a wealth beyond comprehension,
Until it dawned on the commoners
 To riot about it!

Victorian second sons of Gentry
Brought Red Deer, hare and pheasant
Or used Natives for game on their
Thousands of acres, admirers of
Batman- they made a Name, some
   A fortune from dispossession 
To create a new line of inheritance in
Australian real estate.

Every Empire/Australia Day advertised
To the populace we're supposed to give thanks
 To the Commonwealth under the poxy

 Union Jack banner dominating the Southern sky, 
Reminding us of who sent the boats of 

Rejects - to conquer another sovereign asset,
Taking the credit for the proletariat paradise.

(c)copyright Jan 22 2012

all rights reserved

FREE TO LUST, LOVE AND MARRY

In 1990 the first Labor Premier elected in 21 years, Wayne Goss, led the way in reforming the laws of the land with recommendations from the Fitzgerald Inquiry(into Police Corruption).

They de-criminalized same-sex, sexual activity! Yes, my children, after you were born - 1990 -your "Uncle" Anthony and "Auntie" Jayne could be charged with a criminal offense for consenting sexual activity. 

Lest we forget that human rights and dignity is set in stone at birth the National Party in Queensland have always opposed reform based on their religious in-doctrination. They are the "chosen" ones to make a world in their God's image, and that doesn't include people with a different sexuality. 

Even within the progressive Queensland Labor Party there is a struggle between the humanist secular membership and the culturally Catholic members who resist to respect women's rights and decriminilise the 1899 Criminal code on abortion.

Julie  spake from the pulpit of
her Ancestors church at Bredon,
Worcestershire in 2010 - No Need to be
Afraid - be Free and Read widely! 

You may ask what about the "Separation of Church and State" which has become a cliche in these situations. It makes me wonder if we are living in a Theocracy at times...

The insidious influence of the religious high and mighty is shocking for people like me who have seen and read that the historical and ongoing oppression of classes of people has had it's root in non-regulated capitalism and religious ideologies. 

Even with the good news from the Labor Premier Anna Bligh, that the Queensland Government has passed a Civil Union Act - it was too much to delete the remaining crime of sodomy - so that all sexual activity is legal for 16year olds if consensual.

Politicians can circumvent, even exclude discriminatory elements within the Anti-Discrimination Act 1991, with excuses like my constituents aren't ready for change. The big priviledge ticket of course that us women are used to is that Members of Parliament can vote according to their Conscience - on our behalf!

It may be only 21 years since  homosexuality was removed from the Criminal Code, but Queensland is the only State in Australia to have a remnant discriminatory `CONSENT law. whi

There is no comprehensive sex education course in Queensland schools. Knowledge of laws and sexual health are a matter of chance:

Section 208 of 1899 has a 14 year imprisonment threat for males or females if they consent to anal sex under 18 years. 

Consent is not accepted as a defense if charged and brought to Court....Age of Consent - what's it all about?

So Queensland politicians and the community are prepared to punish young people through a criminal process(and throw in the Media barage like the recent Cairns abortion pill case), for charges to do with their  private sexual lives (It only takes one spiteful fundamentalist).

With the organised membership drives of evangelical Christianity

 it is important for young people to recognise that they can't be complacent about the liberal democratic lives they take for granted.

If one thinks Queensland Labor is too slow at reform sometimes wait till the Opposing, really conservative members get a majority in the House of Parliament!

Those with political power and/or a Religious mission stemming from stone age Patriarchs don't like to give away their Power and prejudices. 

 They may sincerely feel that people like me are going to a literal Hell and feel pity for me (but not for long).

LET'S (ALP) PARTY! 

Courier Mail photo Sept 17 of  Andrew Frazer being sworn in as Deputy Premier of Queensland,
being congratulated by Premier Anna Bligh and Governor Penny Wensley AO.

What wonderful Timing....

Wise and just legislation... He may be "straight" but we're glad he's in the ALP!

The opportunity presented itself to impress the ALP National Conference at the weekend (that a modern secular government does not support  discriminating exclusion in our laws, even in Queensland which is notoriously socially(religiously)conservative.

There's a very good reason MLA Andrew Fraser has become our Deputy Premier of Queensland - he's clever and creative, progressive and professional.  

Kairos, son of Zeus - god of Opportunity

As I have recently returned from the birth place of democracy in Athens I have an added appreciation of the ancient layers of meaning for the Greek word  KAIROS!  

I reckon it is emblematic of what Andrew Fraser has grasped in the workings of  the Queensland Parliament where a vote to support a law to enable same sex couples to show their commitment and public love in

 A CIVIL UNION: Queensland Parliament, Australia was presented and has now passed!

"Our interrelationships define our society and inspire our creativity. Democracy and art are both functions of the truth that we do not live alone. For many of us this communitarian conviction lies at the core of our politics.

We should - in a civil society - not live a fiction through our laws.
Our laws should accept the truth of human relationships."

 ANDREW FRASER presenting a private member's bill to the  Queensland Parliament.

I admired and delighted in the KAIROS which Andrew has taken, being right before the weekend's ALP National Conference in Sydney where the Federal Government found an intensity of purpose to change the Australian Labor Party Platform to change the Commonwealth's Marriage Act so it reflects a modern secular society which governs a special contract between two people.

One day I can call my sister's partner of 25 years
my SISTER-IN-LAW!

The Kids love having Auntie Deb and Auntie Jayne.

 Kids don't discriminate until they are taught to.
What is  a  CONSCIENCE VOTE all about - that the Prime Minister thinks is an intelligent solution in a secular society?
If the Catholic countries of Spain and Portugal can support gay marriage why not Australia?

GET UP!

STAND UP
FOR YOUR RIGHTS!

rainbowlaborqld.blogspot.com

Don't Civil Union Me - Will You Marry Me?