Former Prime Minister Julia Gillard made her first pubic appearance since being overthrown by rival Kevin Rudd. The former PM kept a low profile throughout the recent election campaign and is now out of politics all together.
Yesterday Ms Gillard appeared at the Sydney Opera House in conversation with feminist author Anne Summers. During the event Ms Gillard took questions from the audience. A young boy asked the former PM why she didn’t allow gay people to get married?
Ms Gillard answered, “I do understand that the position I took on gay marriage perplexed many people, given who I am and so many of my beliefs. I’ve actually had lot of conversations with many of my old friends about this, some of whom have got a different view than me.
“But, I’m a lot older than you,” Ms Gillard told the young man, “and when I went to University and started forming my political views of the world, we weren’t talking about gay marriage indeed as women, as feminists, we were critiquing marriage. If someone had said to me as a twenty year old, ‘what about you get into a white dress to symbolise virginity, and you get your father to walk you down an aisle and give you away to a man who’s waiting at the end of the aisle’, I would have looked with puzzlement and said ‘what on earth would I do that for?’.
“I’m conscious that these may be views that have dated and that the way people interpret marriage now is different to the kinds of interpretations that I had. I think that marriage in our society should play its traditional role and we could come up with other institutions which value partnerships, value love, value lifetime commitment. You know, I have a valuable lifetime commitment and haven’t felt the need at any point to make that into a marriage. So I know that that is a really different reasoning that most people come at with these issues, but that’s my reasoning.
Ms Gillard said that for there to be a serious look at gay marriage there needs to be a conscience vote on all side of politics.
Watch Gillard’s reply below.
