Ian Johnson, Out Now
November 10, 2007
TOPICS: Australian election campaign. John Howard. Kevin Rudd. Gay votes in the forthcoming Australian election. Liberal Party and Labor Party do battle for hearts and minds of lesbian and gay voters. John Howard and Kevin Rudd play for the gay vote. Electorate of Wentworth sees Malcolm Turnbull trapped as Malcolm In The Middle of Labor and Liberal Party games for gay voters.
Gay Market News has been keeping you up to date with the forthcoming Australian election and the battle between the ruling Liberal Party's John Howard and the Labor Party Opposition leader Kevin Rudd as Australians prepare to head for the polls.
I will be voting in a seat called Wentworth -- home to one of Australia's most gay electorates -- taking in the traditional gay and lesbian heartland suburbs of Sydney including Darlinghurst, Surry Hills and Redfern as well as Sydney city CBD.
The current local member in Wentworth is the Liberal Party government Environment Minister, Malcolm Turnbull -- who could probably be forgiven for feeling more like 'Malcolm in the Middle' as his re-election campaign looks like seriously coming unstuck.
The Labor Party opposition candidate, George Newhouse, is on a lower primary vote, but a Galaxy Poll to be released tomorrow will show that after preferences, Labor and Liberal candidates are stuck in a 50-50 dead heat.
Add to that the high proportion of gay voters and a strong anti-Liberal Greens Party vote, and Wentworth is an electorate worth voting in.
I will vote as an overseas elector next week, and my vote will be most heavily influenced by the environment and gay and lesbian equal rights issues.
So who to vote for?
Labor has left me somewhat underwhelmed with Labor leader Kevin Rudd choosing to speak out against gay marriage last month.
The Liberal Party under John Howard is hard to vote for too though -- as John Howard seems to me to be tacitly homophobic -- despite various weasel words to the contrary his actions have seemed consistently to be anti-gay and anti-equality for gay and lesbian Australians.
The Greens are appealing given the fact that the environment is the issue that I believe matters more to Australia's future generations than practically anything else. But the Greens tend not to get elected in the Australian version of the House of Commons (the Lower House), Greens usually get elected only to the house of review -- the Senate.
Luckily the Greens are passing on preferences to the Labor Party so that may help see the current anti-equality government of John Howard being voted out, although anything can happen. If a week is a long time in politics then two weeks is a near eternity.
To add some gay flavor to all this -- the Labor candidate's ex-girlfriend (I kid you not!) is running as an Independent candidate on an environmental platform, where she seeks to appeal to the gay vote through the use of Hunks for the Environment. Oh please.
All of which brings us back to the hapless Malcolm Turnbull - the current sitting local member.
He has been running full page gay advertising for weeks now in Sydney gay media, but with an evident absence of linking to the views of his leader John Howard.
This week Malcolm Turnbull spoke at a pre-election dinner of the Sydney Gay and Lesbian Business Association, and announced that if re-elected the Liberal Party would allow same sex partners to benefit from equal rights -- but only in relation to the one issue of superannuation, or pension rights, not the other 57 areas of discrimination that exist, as recently identified in a Human Rights and Equal Opportunities Commission HREOC report.
Despite what Malcolm Turnbull may want to say or do in relation to gay rights he is hamstrung by John Howard -- a leader who cannot be considered to be a friend of the lesbian and gay community at all.
He must feel very much like Malcolm in The Middle.
All of which makes it easier for me to know who will get my gay vote in Wentworth, and sorry Malcolm, I won't be putting a "1" in the box next to the name Turnbull of the party marked 'Liberal' -- handicapped as it is by John Howard's conservative and non-equality views.
I think most of the gay and lesbian voters in Wentworth are likely to do the same. Even despite the presence of gay Climate Hunks in the election mix.
An interesting -- and excruciatingly long -- two weeks lies ahead of us all.
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