After more than a decade, the Australian Marriage Equality campaign is one of the most well-honed of its kind, bringing together gay and straight supporters and targeting politicians. Now success looks like it will ultimately depend on a plebiscite of all voters. A special report by Brigid Delaney

In a packed hall on a humid day in Ipswich, Ivan Hinton-Teoh, deputy director of Australian Marriage Equality (AME), tells his story. How he fell in love with, proposed to and married his sweetheart. How he had found the one he wanted to be with for the rest of his life.



He explains how his grandmother held gay people in disdain until the moment she discovered her grandson was gay. Within months Ivan married Chris in a commitment ceremony attended by his joyous Nan, his strongest champion to the end.



From Canberra to Adelaide to Albury to Sydney, Hinton-Teoh has stood before crowds or sat in on meetings and told them his story. Often, depending on the audience, he leaves out until late on, as he did with Nan, that his sweetheart was a man.

And then he goes on to explain that after all the happiness of his wedding in Canberra, a week later in December 2013 the high court overturned the ACT Marriage Equality Act, and Ivan and Chris found their union was not legally recognised in Australia.

Hinton-Teoh, now 40, came out when he was 29. He regularly tears up when he tells his story – it is, after all, one of love and loss. But he also uses it as a call to arms. The discrimination is blatant. The courts are capricious. Politicians are not reflecting the will of the people.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ivan Hinton, right, and Chris Teoh at their wedding at Old Parliament House in Canberra in 2013. Within a week the high court had struck down the ACT Marriage Equality Act and the marriage, and those of other gay couples, was no longer recognised in Australian law. Photograph: Rob Griffith/AP

“I was that regional kid who struggled to come to terms with my sexuality,” says Hinton-Teoh. “I was certain my parents were going to kick me out. I was terrified of violence I was going to be subjected to in schools. And I was terrified of what my future held because I didn’t have access to the institution of marriage. The government is telling us as soon as we realise our sexuality we don’t have access to this institution, and that’s got to stop.”

Somewhere between 60% and 70% of Australian voters say they support marriage equality, including a majority of Coalition voters, but still, despite it being legal in the US, UK, Canada (where Ivan and Chris were married in 2008), even in Ireland, Ivan’s and Chris’s marriage is not recognised in Australia. This is the country of Mardi Gras and Priscilla, Queen of the Desert of the fair go and egalitarianism. But Ivan, Chris and thousands of other LGBTI couples are still waiting for the right to marry.



Our rallies are different – they are about love, commitment and family Ivan Hinton-Teoh, Australian Marriage Equality

There is a large crowd at the marriage equality rally in Ipswich on a Saturday morning – around200 families with same-sex partners and supporters of marriage equality. Half a dozen rugby types in maroon jerseys with young children in tow fill up the corridor leading off the hall.

Terry Russell, a local delegate of the Transport Workers Union, who is here with his young son, says: “I want my son to grow up in a world where he has equal rights should he be gay. We’ve got some good friends who are gay and they should have the right to be married.”

A lone protester is sitting outside with police, peevish and aggrieved: “They grabbed me and pushed me out. Isn’t that assault?”

Broad, with a beard, he wears a high-vis vest and sweats in the heat. He’s driven an hour to be here from a small inland town and reckons when Islamic State invades Australia, the first people they’ll come for are gay people.

Glenn Lazarus, the rugby league great turned federal senator, still bulky from his playing days, takes to the stage after Hinton-Teoh: “Society is ready for this. Two people who fall in love – they should be able to get married. I just think let’s do it … let’s do it right now.”



Hinton-Teoh comes from a family of successful marriages. “I always wanted that for myself,” he says. And so it is that much of the language around the campaign for marriage equality is reassuring, conservative.

“Our rallies are different – they are about love, commitment and family,” says Hinton-Teoh. “What our campaign communicates is not an adversarial public engagement but one of welcome.”

The Ipswich rally serves several purposes. Partly it is about the gathering and the engagement, where families of like mind and circumstance can meet and share stories and revive for another push for marriage equality.

And there is political calculation here too. Ipswich, viewed down south as potentially suspect (it was the cradle of Pauline Hanson’s One Nation party), is part of a region where there is strong Coalition support for marriage equality. MPs from south-east Queensland who support marriage equality include Terri Butler, Wyatt Roy, Teresa Gambaro and Warren Entsch. But the federal MP for the seat that includes Ipswich, Labor’s Shayne Neumann, opposes it. At this rally only the state Labor member, Jennifer Howard, is in attendance.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘We need to tell our kids it’s OK to be who they are’: Queenslanders stand firm on marriage equality – video

The aims of the rally, according to Hinton-Teoh, are to “highlight the strength of support for marriage equality in the community, to raise the profile of the issue, to start conversations in the community, to give the local member an opportunity to be emboldened by that support and to identify champions within the community who can carry on the campaign on a local level”.



In four years in the marriage equality movement, Hinton-Teoh become very familiar with the inside of airport terminals, regional airstrips, country towns. Over a week he has travelled between Queensland, the ACT, Victoria and Tasmania. The campaign for marriage equality has become a battle – one that has run a lot longer than its advocates expected.

On one level it’s a movement that has spread outwards – to places like Ipswich, Tamworth and Bunbury, where 10 years ago to hold hands with your same-sex partner in public was to risk aggression. But it has also found its natural centre – Canberra, where the federal politicians are – and the fight returns there over and over again.

The numbers game

Australian Marriage Equality emerged in response to the Howard government’s legislation banning same-sex marriage in 2004, when wording of the Marriage Act was changed to state that marriage is an institution between a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others. Rodney Croome, the current director of AME, was among the founders.

The first national co-convenors, when AME was formed in 2005, were Luke Gahan and Geraldine Donoghue, and it had four other leadership teams before Croome took over. Croome’s predecessor, Alex Greenwich, is an MP in the New South Wales parliament. The campaign ran print ads at the time of the Howard amendment and at the 2004 federal election. They started running television ads in 2009 to coincide with the first serious attempt to repeal those amendments. The senior figures in the campaign are volunteers. Hinton-Teoh, a small business owner, says he works more than 100 hours a week for AME, and Croome even more than that.

The strategy is to achieve equal rights via amendments to the federal Marriage Act. “We want to get the majority of members of parliament to support marriage equality,” Croome says simply.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Rodney Croome, the national convenor of Australian Marriage Equality, is a veteran gay rights campaigner who won a landmark case to legalise homosexuality in Tasmania. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Since the beginning, the organisation has homed in on individual parliamentarians on both sides of the house to persuade them to vote for changes.

It’s a technique that differs from the old style activism of public rallies and the derided clicktivism of electronic petitions. AME instead borrows both from grassroots activism and high-powered, very focused lobbying. For years the most important numbers in AME’s life have been those in the Canberra parliament.

Their strategy is to tick the MPs off electorate by electorate, using constituents to visit their local member to discuss marriage equality.



In 2004 the Labor party, including those on the left such as Tanya Plibersek and Anthony Albanese, voted for the Howard amendments. The Labor party’s large Catholic base and the sway of conservative unions such as the “Shoppies” (Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees’ Association) have meant the party’s support for marriage equality has been hard won.

Last month, Guardian Australia reported that the Shoppies had discussed dropping its opposition to marriage equality at both its national executive and national conference. Research by the union found members either supported marriage equality or were indifferent to it.

Over the past decade, marriage equality first won support from inner-city Labor MPs, then suburban Labor MPs, then, most recently, inner-city Liberals, Croome says. Now comes to the push to persuade rural, regional and suburban Coalition MPs.

“We have selected 25 key electorates where there is a Liberal who could be persuaded,” Croome says. “We aim to ensure that there is always someone going into the [office of the] member to explain why it matters – and telling them their personal story.”

A personal story may include bullying at school or discrimination at work, or it may be a parent explaining how she wants her daughter to have the same chance to marry as her heterosexual sons.

Heterosexual people with no obvious interest can make a difference Rodney Croome, director of Australian Marriage Equality

Hinton-Teoh says: “We have run petitions in the past but what will always be more powerful is when people take the time to share their story.”

There is a space on the AME website to send personal messages to MPs, which is a popular feature. “One of our call outs for stories was so successful that out of respect to the MPs we decided to aggregate the emails – one email for every thousand letters of support. Attached would be a PDF of 1,000 stories for marriage equality,” says Hinton-Teoh.

The AME calls the constituents visiting their MPs “local champions”.



“These people are highly motivated and they organise others,” Croome explains. “They have good local connections – and they can go to the local real estate agent or school principal and encourage them to speak to the MP and persuade others.”

Sarah Henderson, the Liberal MP in the western Victorian seat of Corangamite, was visited by “local champions” and in June announced her support for same-sex marriage. She told ABC 24 that she reached that conclusion after extensive consultations with her electorate.



The campaign wants a declared majority of the house in favour. It doesn’t have that, but is close to a majority that includes undeclared supporters. When Henderson indicated her support, Croome said he believed that might have tipped the balance in the House of Representatives.

“We may just have crossed the line into a majority – I’m not calling it yet, but I think we’re very close.”

The campaign cites with approval electorates such as Corangamite and Gilmore, in New South Wales, where local MP Ann Sudmalis ran an electorate-wide survey which she said would determine her vote. It returned a strong “yes”. Croome says: “Heterosexual people with no obvious interest can make a difference.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Marriage equality badges. ‘We are always bubbling along,’ says Rodney Croome, director of Australian Marriage Equality. Photograph: Daniel Kalisz/AAP

The strategy has thrown up some unexpected and strong alliances. Take Warren Entsch. The 65 year-old Liberal National party member from the Queensland seat of Leichhardt worked closely with advocates from AME to introduce a private member’s bill into the House of Representatives to amend the Marriage Act in 2015.



“Every meeting with Warren Entsch ends and starts with a hug,” says Hinton-Teoh.

Entsch’s conversion happened after he discovered a member of his electorate was transgender and had faced discrimination. Since then he has been one of the movement’s staunchest allies. “It’s always odd to stretch out [in Entsch’s office] and have your feet on a crocodile skin and see stockman’s whips on the wall,” says Hinton-Teoh.

The plebiscite and ‘plan B’

In August the campaign was thrown a curveball. With the number of supporters in the House of Representatives verging on a majority, Tony Abbott, then prime minister, decided to change the rules, floating and then confirming plans to put the issue to a plebiscite some time in the next parliament.

Malcolm Turnbull, a conspicuous supporter of marriage equality, had supported Entsch’s bill as a frontbencher. But when he took over as prime minister he endorsed the plebiscite (estimated to cost $158.4m), as part of the compact with the right of the Coalition that enabled him to succeed Abbott. The move threatened to derail the strategy of AME, which has worked so hard to target politicians.

In meetings with supporters in Canberra in September, Croome acknowledged the blow but was philosophical. “One of the reasons why a free vote has been canned is because we can get the numbers. We have built it up to a majority in the Senate – and in the House of Representatives 67 declared supporters and four or five undeclared. That’s 72 and we need 76. We are very close. One of the reasons the hard right of the Coalition worked so hard is that they know we could win this in parliament. This is all to divert attention that we have been successful.”

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Warren Entsch with Greens senator Sarah Hanson-Young from the Greens and Independent MP Cathy McGowan after introducing his private member’s bill on marriage equality in August. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

Croome is a veteran of gay rights campaigns, and focused for a long time on legal change in his home state of Tasmania. As recently as 1997 he won a landmark high court case (Croome v Tasmania) to decriminalise homosexuality – the culmination of a powerful campaign that harnessed the the power of the UN against the state.

He is careful with words, sometimes over-deliberate, to the point of seeming stand-offish in conversation. But no one knows this issue better. He allows Guardian Australia to photograph the start of meetings, but not to sit in. For Croome, keeping conversations about strategic matters with politicians private is more important than the extra media access. This is the balancing act: the need for discretion balanced with the need for publicity - when to amplify the public aspect of the campaign, and when to go quietly.

The move towards a plebiscite requires a different style of activism from that of legal challenges or lobbying. When the plebiscite was announced, those in the marriage equality movement set up a “war room” in Canberra and hunkered down to work on a plan B.

This includes raising money to broaden the campaign from targeting MPs to targeting whole electorates. A campaign director, Erin McCallum, and two part-time assistants were appointed, becoming AME’s first paid staff.

Regardless, deep pockets will be needed to reach all Australians of voting age.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Tony Abbott threatened to sack ministers who voted for marriage equality, before settling on a plan for a plebiscite. The row was one of several to destabilise his leadership. Photograph: Lukas Coch/EPA

In October, Croome made clear that the parliamentary strategy was being finessed, not ditched. “We should have a free vote in our parliament, and if there is a plebiscite it should be fair and uncomplicated,” he told supporters in an email.



“Whichever path we go down, the key to success is having a majority of MPs who support marriage equality. That is why we are focusing on local community campaigns to persuade undecided MPs to back reform.”

A big fear for marriage equality campaigners is that the No campaign will run negative advertising, stigmatising gay people and fanning homophobia. It’s a spectre that is brought up by multiple speakers, including Lazarus, in Ipswich. Opinion polls consistently suggest Australians support marriage equality, but the plebiscite question has yet to be framed and parliament’s attitude to that vote has yet to be properly established. Even if the vote goes the campaign’s way, there are concerns that it will come at the cost of dividing people.

Recently the Australian Christian Lobby, which opposes marriage equality, asked supporters to find $200,000 to defend traditional marriage.



“Your support today will help ACL build a $200,000 ‘war chest’ so we can get the message out, resource our team to present a voice for marriage, and equip churches for grassroots actions,” the email to supporters said.



The Australian fight for marriage equality has been one of the longest in the world. It is a compliment of sorts that the campaign has become so professional, so focused, so strategic. The passionate intensity of the cause can flame out if required to burn over the course of years. Marriage equality in Australia has been a live issue for more than 10 years and, so the campaign’s leaders calculate, a different quality of activism is needed – cool, deliberate and focused on the long game.



Croome reels them off, the leadership found wanting: “Nothing from Rudd, Gillard, Abbott.”



Now he has Turnbull, Bill Shorten and Richard di Natale of the Greens all supporting marriage equality. But still no change.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Shortly after Malcolm Turnbull took over as prime minister, activists gathered in Sydney for a rally for marriage equality to urge him not to delay a vote. Photograph: Brendon Thorne/Getty Images

“In that environment we always have a new path forward, if a federal law is blocked, going through the states, if a state law is blocked – vice versa. We are always bubbling along,” Croome insists.

Indeed there are aspects of AME’s plan A that can easily be adapted to plan B; and in the AME strategy there are lessons for other single-issue groups. Act more like a lobby group – an insider rather than outsider – recruit people of influence inside the chamber to support your bill, have a fantastic website and a responsive, well-managed Facebook page, invest in research and polling, make story-telling central to your message, be bipartisan, make friends with corporate Australia, and have a movement that is agile but built for endurance.

Being bipartisan, not too radical, not scaring the horses was part of the plan

Other groups have also campaigned for equal marriage, including Equal Love, which holds rallies each August.



In 2012 the activist group GetUp! joined with AME to send 3,000 roses to federal politicians on Valentines Day and hosted a dinner for three same-sex couples with then prime minister Julia Gillard, hoping to persuade her to change her stance.



But AME and GetUp! have quite distinct approaches, Croome says. “GetUp! rely on a big database and they say ‘come and protest or write this letter’.

“Ours was much more targeted: to find highly motivated people to speak to their MP and was quite tailored to the electorate. It was not about mass mobilisation – it was about key influencers who are less likely supporters.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest ‘I am the proud father of a gay son’: Australian parents fight for marriage equality – video

Croome and his team looked at what worked and what didn’t in the US. “Their initial approach was mass mobilisation in places like California – and it failed.”

The lesson was to become more targeted. “You don’t take people’s support for granted,” he says.



Win the middle ground and you win marriage equality is the thinking. In Ireland there was a “Call your granny” campaign targeting young people and their grandparents. In Australia, it is also about reaching out to one potential supporter at a time. In many ways the campaign has been like hand-selling – one town at a time, one MP at a time, one person at a time.

“We’re going to win it one local newspaper at a time,” Croome says at one point.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Corinna Peck (left) and Stacey Cowen celebrate after their marriage in Canberra. Like Ivan Hinton and Chris Teoh, their marriage was annulled by a high court ruling. Photograph: Alan Porritt/AAP

As boring as marriage itself

Hinton-Teoh’s journey from marriage to unmarriage is just one of the complexities and absurdities – real people getting caught in barbed wire erected, then removed, then erected again by courts and the crown. Meanwhile, the rest of the world has galloped past Australia. In June the US supreme court declared same-sex marriage legal, and and in May a referendum produced the same result in Ireland, where a far tighter seam between church and state made the outcome even more stunning.

Hinton-Teoh is philosophical. If Australians are now at risk at being bored to death by the marriage equality debate, that can only be a good thing. If they have a position, he believes it is more likely to be “let’s just get on with it”, mirroring the shrugged-shoulder response of Julie Bishop, who declared that she had “no concerns” about marriage equality.

It’s the victory not of a radical transcendent moment in society, but a move towards a position that seems rational and normal – boring, in fact. Maybe as boring as marriage itself.



“We had to reach the soft supporters and get them in there. That’s what the campaign is about. That’s what we’ve doing in these electorates – and this will be ... key for us,” Croome says.



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Ivan Hinton-Teoh, Rodney Croome, Warren Entsch, Jill Hammond and Shelley Argent meeting in Entsch’s office in parliament in Canberra. A lot of the campaign’s work at federal level is carried out behind the scenes. Photograph: Mike Bowers/The Guardian

To this end, the AME stopped framing the debate in the political and social language of equality, and started framing it in the emotional language of love.



“Just talking about equality isn’t enough,” Croome says. “Because most heterosexual people don’t understand marriage in terms of equality, they understand it in terms of sacrifice, love, joy, family. These values are also to be found in same-sex relationships.”



Janine Middleton, the chief executive of AME, is a former banker from Sydney’s north shore who favours pearls and neat, sharp suits. She’s been successful in getting corporations and conservatives to support marriage equality – making it more of an insider movement than one for outliers.

“Janine brings with her a way of communicating with a demographic – the corporate sector – that has been really beneficial for us,” Hinton-Teoh says.



Australian Christian Lobby asks donors for war chest to fight marriage equality Read more

The AME corporate support program has at the last count 767 organisations signed up – including big names such as Qantas, Optus, Commonwealth Bank, David Jones, ANZ, Coca-Cola; even groups that might not naturally be associated with such activism, such as the AFL.

AME doesn’t just target the big guns. Ads have been placed in regional newspapers across the country naming local businesses that have come out in support of marriage equality. “These are small businesses in Rocky [Rockhampton], Goulburn, Bunbury, Victor Harbour, and they are all in key electorates where there are Liberal members who we sought to persuade. And we have,” Croome says.

A debate’s tone is no accidental thing. It’s highly calibrated, tested and – to an extent – controlled. AME is framing the marriage equality debate in an inclusive and bipartisan way. The tone could almost be described as conservative.



By pulling the marriage equality movement into the mainstream, organisers of the AME have to be vigilant that supporters stay on message. Burning effigies of Abbott or Turnbull at rallies would only harm the cause, not help it.

“In August there was an international organisation that wanted to come and make a statement about the PM at the time [Abbott] and say stuff at a personal level, and we were able to manage that so that it didn’t happen,” says Hinton-Teoh.



“Our campaign values have always been about positivity and the value of marriage – we didn’t think it was well targeted. One of our campaign strengths has always been built around building relationships – we kept a dialogue open with him [Abbott] and his office.”

But the mainstream success of the movement has also meant there’s pressure in the gay community to be a cheerleader for marriage equality.



It’s really tough to say there are more important issues than marriage equality – but there are other things we need Nic Dorward

Nic Dorward, 33 year-old Sydneysider who identifies as an HIV-positive queer man, wonders if the focus on marriage equality has come at the expense of other issues that affect the LGTBI community.



“When I speak out against this [marriage equality], people write to me and say they don’t feel like they can talk about this because they are betraying the community. It’s really tough to say there are more important issues than marriage equality – but there are other things we need.”

Dorward cites HIV issues and global violence against queer people.



“I am not critiquing the call for marriage, but it’s a long been a part of gay liberation that sense of difference and other, and with the focus on marriage, that is slowly being corroded and moved across to a more heteronormative view.

“I personally have no interest in the initiation of marriage, getting married – from a feminist point of view as well, the way in which marriage is being used by religion and social structures to enforce a form of control over women and people. It’s kind of hijacked this very human biological and passionate response you have when you fall in love with someone – there’s a chemical need to attach yourself to that person forever.”



Facebook Twitter Pinterest Campaigners at a rally for a free vote in marriage equality in Sydney in May. Photograph: Lisa Maree Williams/Getty Images

The gay academic and activist Dennis Altman has also attacked the marriage equality movement. At a public event in Melbourne in 2013 he argued that it was conservative and further marginalised LGBTI people not in long term relationships.

“People being killed in Uganda, people being raped in South Africa because people assume they’re lesbian, men being lured into parks and bashed up in Russia – those are basic human rights [issues]. In Australia if you are in a long-term relationship …you actually have pretty well all those rights.”

Light and a very long tunnel

The crossbench bill to legalise same-sex marriage, backed by Entsch, is still in parliament, but it’s not looking hopeful. Turnbull has not deviated from Abbott’s directive to decide the matter by plebiscite. And so the long road to marriage equality in Australia continues.

Hinton-Teoh says: “People are frustrated because it’s taken so long, there’s a valid frustration of the laboured nature of achieving marriage equality. Every other western nation has moved on.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Julie Bishop told Network Ten’s The Project says she has no ‘absolutely no concerns’ about legalising same-sex marriage.

“But John Berry [United States ambassador to Australia] refers to Australia as the beacon of light for LGBTI rights, and it’s true.

“As we’ve talking about marriage equality for the length of the campaign, we’ve seen enormous reform. I think marriage equality had actually been a mechanism that has carried on a conversation about LGBT people and recognising they are a legitimate part of the community and providing a platform for other discussions.

“We didn’t rally in the streets to achieve removal of 80-odd pieces of legislation that were discriminatory to LGBTI people but, I believe, through sharing our common humanity through the marriage equality movement over the past 11 years, we’ve had a part in building a landscape of respect that helped achieve that,” Hinton-Teoh says.

Changes to laws that once discriminated against same-sex couples include amendments to tax, social security, employment, Medicare, veterans’ affairs, superannuation, workers’ compensation and family law.

The question remains as to whether the campaign can reach a swift, successful conclusion to its core aim. The public will is there – apparently. The will of political leaders is there too – apparently. If Labor wins the next election, the party is committed to a free vote for its MPs on a parliamentary bill and, if that does not pass, a binding vote within four years. If the Liberals win, there should be a plebiscite in the next parliament. Slowly, steadily, the opposition is being eroded.

“It’s incredibly frustrating, but we’ve been there before. I know what it’s like to be almost there and almost lose,” Croome says. “We are going to win this one.”

