For the Greens leader and her son, the festival of pride is a social justice issue with deeply personal roots

Christine Milne thinks of Sydney’s Mardi Gras as more than a gay rights parade with feathers and fake tan. For the Greens leader, the festival of pride is a social justice issue with deeply personal roots.

In 2013, Milne stood with her son Thomas, an out and proud gay man, in the float for parents and friends of lesbian and gay people (Pflag). It was a moment of immense pride for both mother and son.

Thomas was just four years old when his mother was elected to the Tasmanian parliament, partly on a platform of reforming Tasmania’s draconian laws which could see gay men thrown in jail for 25 years for their sexuality.

It was during this time that Milne met and formed friendships with gay rights campaigner Rodney Croome, who is currently Tasmanian of the year, and fellow parliamentarian Bob Brown.

“Through my connection to Bob, I came to better understand the discrimination issues, and I also saw first hand the appalling treatment that Bob was sometimes subject to in the campaign for gay law reform,” Milne told Guardian Australia.

“I saw [former justice of the high court] Michael Kirby spat upon at a public meeting in Devonport. I witnessed in that early period the gay rights campaigners go up to Ulverstone [in north-western Tasmania], which is my hometown, for a public meeting in which the people at the meeting were chanting “kill them, kill them”. This is 1989 and at the time I had two young boys.”

“I had been campaigning for gay rights for a long time before my son, my eldest son came out as a young gay man,” Milne said.

“It is a source of joy to me really, that as circumstances turned out I was a gay rights campaigner who had a gay son,” she laughed.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thomas and Christine Milne at the Mardi Gras parade. Photograph: Australian Greens

Milne said Thomas’s announcement in his mid-teens that he was gay “wasn’t even an issue”. He grew up in a household that loved and supported him, and one that was staunchly committed to social justice issues.

But Milne worried about him nevertheless.

“He still had to deal with bullying on the streets and pretty awful episodes when he would come home quite distressed because thuggery had been going on wherever he had been engaged,” she said.

“You worry about your kids no matter how old they are,” she added.

The Greens leader is particularly concerned about the rates of self-harm and suicide among young people in rural and regional Australia.

She recalls taking a question from a young man when the ABC’s Q&A program visited Toowoomba in 2012.

“Queensland is the only state in Australia to still have the so-called ‘gay panic’ defence as legal as a defence in court against charges of assault, discrimination and possibly murder. Therefore, as a gay Queenslander, I do not feel safe in my own state. I just want to know when my state will stop treating me like a second-class citizen,” the young man, Joel Oborn, asked.

Milne has never been able to forget his words.

“He was really trembling,” she said. “it just reminded me of how hard it was for young people in rural Australia, particularly coming out as an LGBTI [lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, intersex] person and not being confident of support, especially in small communities where everyone knows everyone.”

Milne thought of that young man when she was marching with her son in the 2013 Mardi Gras parade.

“I kept thinking of that boy in Toowoomba and kept thinking that all through rural Australia there are kids who feel like they’ve been abandoned. Well I want to say to them, you’re not abandoned, I’m standing here and if you’ve been rejected with your family then I embrace you.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Thomas and Christine Milne. Photograph: Australian Greens

The long-time senator was close to tears as she described the overwhelming feeling of being part of a tradition like the Sydney Mardi Gras parade, now in its 37th year.

She was instrumental in changing Tasmania’s anti-gay laws in 1997, and thinks about how much has changed since she first came into politics.

“Turning into Oxford Street with Thomas and this big roar from the crowd, and you just think, I am so grateful for that outpouring of love and support to the LGBTI community,” she said. “I still get emotional thinking about it.”

Milne accepts that marching alongside her son was “a political statement”, but said it was entirely his choice.

“I said to Thomas over the years, at some point I’d like to march with you in Mardi Gras, but that’s your call. When you’re ready to do that, I’m ready to do that. And if you’re never ready to do that, that’s fine,” she said.

For her, gay rights was an area “where the personal and the political combine”.

The Greens have pushed for a change to the federal Marriage Act in order to allow same-sex couples to wed. The current wording of the act states that marriage is exclusively between a man and woman.

Milne’s younger son, James, wed in January last year, in what she described as a “poignant” moment.

“Here I am, I’ve got two boys. One’s getting married and one can’t get married even if he wanted to. And you just sit there and you think, I’m their mother. I’d like them both to have the same opportunities in life, and it is totally discriminatory that one of them because of his sexuality can’t. And that is just wrong.”

She wants prime minister Tony Abbott, whose sister is a lesbian, to grant Liberal MPs a conscience vote on the issue of same-sex marriage. Abbott says it is up to the party room to decide.

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Labor will allow a conscience vote on the matter.

Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young will move a motion in the Senate during the next sitting period to allow all MPs and senators a conscience vote.

“Marriage equality has become a symbol, a very important policy reform, but it’s become symbolic for what needs to happen,” Milne said.

But she wants politicians to look beyond the marriage issue to fixing the underlying causes of discrimination and their manifestations in the self-harm and suicide of young gay and lesbian people.

“We have to address that,” she said firmly.