It's more than just marriage.
I held hands with my Dad as we walked to the polling booth at my primary school, 48 years ago. There were two questions that day. One dealt with the number of seats in the House of Representatives and the Senate. The booklet sent to households ahead of the referendum presented both arguments: "for" and "against". The other question dealt with discriminatory references to Aboriginal people in Australian Constitution. The booklet set out only one case: for removing them.
"Why?" I asked my Dad. "Why isn't there an argument against this one, as well as an argument for?" "Because there isn't an argument against," my Dad replied. "We want to count Aboriginal people in the census and we want to treat them like other people."
That day, 90 per cent of the electorate voted yes. While I have been proud of my small part in what happened that day, for much of my life I have thought of what happened as a mere administrative change. The Commonwealth became able to make laws with respect to Aborigines and was forced to include them in the census. But I've discovered more recently that for Aboriginal people it meant much more.
They'd previously not known what Anglos and others thought about them. Every bad encounter made them believe the worst. After the vote they realised that the overwhelming majority of Anglos liked them and wanted them included. Almost every Anglo they had seen in the street or on the bus or at the school had said yes.
That's what a vote for gay marriage will do if it happens this year. It'll be about more than marriage. It'll be about inclusion. It'll be the Australian Parliament saying, "Welcome to Australia".
Because despite laws that make discrimination illegal and despite all the talk about the pink dollar and enviable lifestyles, gay and lesbian and bisexual and transgender people aren't as included as the rest of us.
It shows up in the stats, if not in what hetro Australians like to believe about what they believe.
The Household, Income and Labour Dynamics survey is Australia's version of Seven Up. It has been tracking about 20,000 Australians each year since 2001. In 2012 for the first time the survey asked questions about their sexual identity.
Around 1.6 per cent said they were gay or lesbian, and 1.5 per cent bisexual. Around 0.8 per cent were "other" and 3 per cent preferred not to say.
The gay men earned much less than the straight men, about 20 per cent less, even when the figure were manipulated to adjust for education and other characteristics.
The gap is because those gay men who had jobs earned lower wages (about 11 per cent lower when adjusted) and because they were less likely to be employed at all, an astonishing 15 per cent less likely.
And it was all the worse when their sexual identity was obvious. Although 2012 was the first year in which the survey explicitly asked about sexual identity, it had been asking the gender of live-in partners since the beginning. The gay men who were (fairly openly) living with same-sex partners did much worse than the single gay men who were better able to keep their identities secret. And they did worse over time. While the earnings of all types of gay men had climbed more slowly than those of hetrosexual men since 2001, the earnings of those in relationships had climbed the slowest.
In contrast, lesbians were just as likely to be employed as straight women (although bisexual women and women who preferred to not to say were underemployed). And they took home more, about 33 per cent more. However, the extra pay was almost entirely due to the fact that they put in extra hours. Their hourly rates were little different to those of other women. It was the same whether or not they had partners. On average they got paid less than men (as all women do on average) and got extra pay only for extra work.
Joseph Sabia and Mark Wooden from the Melbourne Institute of Applied Economic and Social Research say their findings are consistent with discrimination against gay males. Gay females are taken advantage of rather than paid higher wages. Their lower likelihood of easing back on work to have children could be in part the result of discrimination against potential lesbian parents.
Allowing gay marriage, as the Parliament is set to do, will be wonderful for those wanting to get married. But it will also be good for those that don't. It'll show all of us that we want to include all of us. It'll make it harder to leave people out.
Peter Martin is economics editor of The Age.
In The Age and Sydney Morning Herald
