Greens Release Federal Election GLBT Platform
The Federal branch of the Australian Greens Party has released the GLBT rights platform it will take to the coming election.
Posted on the party’s website at www.greens.org.au the document lists a wide range of goals and wishes for reforms in areas affecting gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgendered persons amounting to total equality under Federal law, for both Australian citizens and non-citizens situated in or affected by Australian jurisdictions.
The Greens Federal policy, if implemented, would also place Commonwealth pressure on state and territory governments to bring about similar reforms and consult with GLBT groups on policies and programs affecting the GLBT community.
The platform reads as follows-
Principles- The Australian Greens believe that:
-Freedom of sexuality and gender identity are fundamental human rights.
-Acceptance and celebration of diversity are essential for genuine social justice and equality.
-People have the right to assume their self-identified sex.
-Discrimination on the basis of sexuality and gender identity is a significant cause of psychological distress, mental illness and suicide.
-The health needs of all Australians should be provided for without discrimination and with respect and equity.
Goals- The Australian Greens want:
-Legal and social environments free from harassment, abuse, vilification, stigmatisation, discrimination, disadvantage or exploitation on the basis of sexuality or gender identity.
-The legalisation of marriage between two consenting adults regardless of sexuality or gender identity.
-De facto relationships to have equal status in law and government policy regardless of sexuality and gender identity.
-Access, regardless of sexuality and gender identity, to adoption, fostering, artificial insemination and in vitro fertilisation procedures.
-The education system to provide age-appropriate information about the diversity of sexuality.
-Access to the full range of medical and health services required by people with needs related to their sexuality and gender identity.
Measures- The Australian Greens will:
-Legislate to remove discrimination against Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender or Intersex (LGBTI) people in federal legislation.
-Require governments and their agencies to consult with LGBTI communities and representative groups on the development of policies and programs that affect LGBTI people.
-Initiate national anti-discrimination public education campaigns.
-Legislate to allow marriage regardless of sexuality or gender identity.
-Introduce legislation to ensure fair and equal treatment under Commonwealth law of all relationships regardless of sexuality and gender identity.
-Support nationally consistent age of consent laws.
-Remove convictions for consensual homosexual acts from legal records.
-End the inappropriate application of offensive behaviour, indecent behaviour, 'promotion' and incitement laws to non-heterosexual acts.
-Fund services to support and protect LGBTI youth, in particular suicide prevention, peer support, coming out, counselling, and housing services and programs.
-Establish intersex as a gender recognised by the legal system.
-Support the provision of accurate information, counselling and referral for individuals with, and parents and carers of, infants with intersex conditions.
-Support gender assignment for people born with an intersex condition being made only when they are able to express personal sexual identity.
-Support the granting of political asylum on humanitarian grounds to people persecuted in their own countries on the basis of their sexuality or gender identity.
No other party is yet to release a platform so wide ranging on GLBT rights, though it is expected that the Australian Democrats will make a similar pledge on gay rights before the election.
The release of the policy document comes as all other parties in the Victorian state Parliament joined forces to block Greens amendments to that state’s Equal Opportunity Act which, amongst other things, would have broadened the Act by removing exemptions which allow small businesses and religious organizations to discriminate on the grounds of age, race, gender, religious beliefs, impairment, marital status, breastfeeding, physical features, industrial activity, marital status, sexual orientation, parental status or status as a carer.
Larger businesses and non-religious institutions have no such exemptions.
Victorian Greens Employment spokesperson and MLC, Sue Pennicuik said that the law as it stands, "essentially means that employees in small businesses and religious schools have less rights than people in the rest of the community and can be discriminated against, including for raising matters about their employment entitlements.
What possible reason or justification can there be for that type of arbitrary discrimination?"
"There are people working who are afraid to reveal their sexuality, and if they do, they can be discriminated against.”
“The Greens believe discrimination is not a relative concept. Discrimination is either right or wrong in principle, and it is wrong to allow discrimination if there are less than five employees in a workplace or if a person happens to work in a religious school."
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Body Found Outside Sydney Gay Club
The body of an unnamed man was discovered on the morning of the 22nd of May, lying in the doorway of one of Sydney’s most popular gay night spots, the Midnight Shift club.
Police initially cordoned off the area after being alerted to the body, placing a blanket over the dead man until he could be removed by ambulance.
The area was then examined for forensic evidence.
Staff from nearby businesses told a journalist from the Sydney Morning Herald that they suspected the unknown man had died of a drug overdose.
However, police have since confirmed the man’s death was alcohol, not drug related.
It seems unlikely that the man was a patron of the Midnight Shift nightclub, having passed away early on a Tuesday morning while the venue was closed.
Elsewhere in Darlinghurst another body was discovered Green Park, near the St Vincent’s Hospital- this second death (age and gender unreported) occurring sometime during the preceding night.
Police say they have no reason to believe the two are linked and reported no suspicious circumstances surrounding this second death after forensic officers investigated the scene.
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Brethren Back in the Spotlight Again
The Exclusive Brethren sect have been accused of bankrolling a NSW Council’s legal action against a sex shop after the business won an appeal over a refusal to grant it development approval.
The Flirt adult store took Lithgow City Council to the NSW Land and Environment Court and won but now council intends to appeal that decision in the Supreme Court with the financial help of an unnamed local businessman who is believed to be a member of the fundamentalist Exclusive Brethren sect.
Council found that there appeared to be no legal impediments to stop a third party donating money towards such a legal action.
Adult industry representative body, the Eros Association has called the donation “tantamount to bribery” and warned that Lithgow City Council was seriously undermining its status as an independent institution.
The Mayor of Lithgow, Neville Castle says he does not know if the businessman in question is a Brethren member, but says his council’s objection to the store are on planning, not moral grounds, and that the source of the money would not change this, telling the SMH, “if anybody else was willing to fund an appeal it’d be on the same lines.”
The news comes as the Sydney Morning Herald reports that the Australian Electoral Commission is about to recommend a Federal Police investigation into the Brethren’s political activities during the last federal election, where nearly $400,000 in electoral funds were paid out of a $10 company set up by a Brethren small business just three weeks before the election.
Brethren spokespersons originally told journalists that the money had come from a number of different businessmen but during the investigation this was contradicted with the official story now being that all of the money came from just one businessman, Mark MacKenzie.
MacKenzie is a former employee of a member of the sect leader Bruce Hale’s family and some of the ads were authorised by the leader’s brother, Stephen Hales.
The Exclusive Brethren live by a strict code which forbids them from mixing socially with outsiders, from accessing many forms of technology and media, and the group deals with crimes within its own communities through an internal system of mediation, leading to accusations that serious crimes occurring within the group are going unreported to police.
A number of senior Brethren have been convicted of child sexual abuse in the last few years with allegations of interference by the group’s hierarchy being made in at least one of these cases.
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Moscow Pride Again Marred By Violence and Arrests
For the second time in as many years, Russian gays and lesbians have been prevented from marching in the streets of their own capital by an official ban by that city’s Mayor, and by organised mobs of homophobic militants, with the apparent tacit approval of Russian police.
Last year a march was attempted despite the ban- the result being the arrest of nearly 200 people, mostly Pride participants, while police rarely intervened against their attackers- who despite outnumbered participants and instigating the violence, only accounted for a tiny percentage of those arrested.
This year a small group of GLBT activists and their supporters did not march, but were assaulted yet again by organised homophobic elements when they gathered to protest the ban, before again being arrested by police.
The main group of protestors were gathering signatures in a park across the road from the offices of the Mayor of Moscow, Yuri Luzhkov, and were asking passers-by to add to a petition which had already been signed by over 35 members of the European Parliament.
Mobs of Russian neo-nazis and members of the Russian Orthodox attacked the group with fists and eggs, setting on a number of individuals while police looked on.
When police finally moved it was the gay protestors, not the attackers who were the main focus of arrests, despite UK activist Peter Tatchell having been punched in the face and hit in the head with a bottle.
The attackers were filmed and photographed during the assault by a number of journalists present on the scene.
When protest leaders later tried to deliver the petition, twenty people were arrested, including most of the organising committee of Moscow Pride, a number of European Parliament MP’s and Tatchell as well.
Volker Beck, an openly gay German Greens MP who was savagely beaten during a press conference at last year’s Pride returned this year and was also one of those arrested.
Most have since been released, however there are fears for those that remain in jail as there have been unconfirmed rumours that some may have been placed in cells with the homophobic rioters who attacked them.
Tatchell has confirmed to journalists that he and Marco Cappato, an Italian member of the European Parliament, were placed in a police bus with skinhead rioters after their arrests.
Both had been assaulted by rioters before being arrested- Cappato as a result of confronting police on their apparent inaction.
A number of celebrities also showed up to give their support including the lead singer of British pop group Right Said Fred, Richard Fairbrass, and Yulia Volkova and Lena Katina, the two singers from Russian faux-lesbian pop duo TATU.
Fairbrass was physically assaulted by homophobic militants, while the two TATU singers had to quickly flee the scene after the vehicles they arrived in were attacked.
Tatchell and the Moscow Pride committee are calling on Western politicians to voice their disapproval of the arrests and the ban on gay rights protests in the hope that Russian authorities will in future allow them their democratic rights to freedom of speech, freedom of association, and public assembly.
Parade organisers said that the suppression of their rights was a bad omen for all Russians in light of the general slide towards authoritarianism that has been seen in the country in the years since President Vladimir Putin took office.
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