Dennis Glover from the Per Capita think tank explains why marriage equality is no longer a controversial issue in suburban Australia and why, despite claims to the contrary by conservative pundits, ordinary working Australians support it:
Many of those questioned – particularly the women – expressed considerable sympathy for gay people wanting to marry. Some had working-class friends who were gay. (Yes, that’s right, gays don’t just live in St Kilda and Fitzroy but in outer-suburban housing estates; and they don’t just work in the arts sector but in shops and factories, too.)
Despite having left school young, and not given to theorising about abstract universal rights, these women instinctively grasped that gay marriage is about justice. The word elites wasn’t mentioned once. This shouldn’t surprise us, because people such as Oprah, Ellen DeGeneres and Elton John have made gay equality a given.
Gay marriage is now a mainstream issue in suburban Australia. In fact, it’s becoming a non-issue, for most at least. Like so many conservative hot button topics, opposing gay marriage is a vote winner only in the minds of out-of-touch culture warriors and cynical factional operators. In large part, working-class Australia is immune to the orthodoxies of the Left and Right.
This openness to gay equality may not have been the case a generation ago, but it is now. Labor should celebrate it, because it’s one of the legacies of the party’s success in opening up the nation to the world and expanding higher education in the 1980s and 90s.
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