Women Speak Tasmania challenges Transforming Tasmania spokesperson, Martine Delaney, to justify the claim their proposed reforms to the Births Deaths and Marriages Registration Act have already been subject to wide community consultation.
Martine Delaney talks about the Options Paper exercise undertaken by Equal Opportunity Tasmania and the former Anti-discrimination Commissioner, Robin Banks, in 2016, as evidence of this consultation.
We’d like to see the submissions presented to this so-called consultation made public, as well as the Commissioner’s final report.
That’s the least Transforming Tasmania can do if they want to persuade the Tasmanian people that no further discussion is necessary.
Labor and the Greens are supporting Transforming Tasmania’s push to allow transgender persons to change the sex marker on their birth certificates on the basis of self-identification alone.
In the interests of transparency and proper governance, shouldn’t they also be insisting Transforming Tasmania prove their claim of rigorous community debate and majority support for their reforms.
Political opportunism is seldom as blatant as the attempt to piggy back these far reaching birth certificate reforms on the back of a simple, Commonwealth mandated procedural change to the Births Deaths and Marriages Act.
Some of us aren’t fooled. The women we speak to are astounded at the implications of these reforms for female only organisations, for women’s sport, for women’s opportunities in education and the workplace, and for the safety of female persons in women’s shelters and prisons.
Martine Delaney also claims “Tasmanians rejected fear-mongering about transgender human rights by voting Yes in last year’s postal survey”.
Wrong. Tasmanians voted ‘Yes’ or ‘No’ on same-sex marriage, It would come as news to most of them that their ‘Yes’ vote was also an endorsement of transgender human rights, and Transforming Tasmania’s proposed changes to the law regulating birth certificates in this state.
