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Penny Wong: Australia's Non-Story of the Week, on BBC news.
Our Finance Minister, the really-quite-awesome Penny Wong, and her girlfriend are going to have a baby.
Australia's national reaction more-or-less amounts to: "Hey, congrats." The only public figure to make negative comments is the odious Fred Nile, who's more-or-less a punchline to the vast majority of the country.
And yet, gay marriage is legal exactly nowhere in this country, and IVF for same-sex couples is illegal in South Australia, so Penny Wong and her beloved had to go out-of-state to get it done. Australia is an odd paradox that way; on the kind of social issues that are a really big deal in America, for the most part, we just don't get that worked up about them. You'd struggle to rouse the kind of protest and opposition to gay marriage that America often features, but you'd also struggle to rouse the kind of support America gets.
(Oh, and serving in the Australian army while being openly homosexual has been allowed since 1992. I had to look that up, because it's a non-issue here.)
In Australia, we just sort of talk about these issues, in a general sense, until the tide of General Opinion has shifted, at which point we quietly amend the law, or until it becomes a serious argument, at which point we vote on it. This is why we never had a Revolutionary War - we didn't make a fuss, until a few years ago the question of whether we wanted to abandon the monarchy in favour of a republic became a sufficiently major argument that we had a referendum on it, and we decided against.
This is one of the things I love about Australia, though. We, as a nation, do care about things, but it's just sort of un-Australian to get so violently exercised about it as Americans do.
It has its benefits, too. Our Prime Ministerial assassination tally still sits at zero, and my one close encounter with a Prime Minister is one you couldn't imagine having with an American president: while leaving an event John Howard had also been at, I was standing by the road near the War Memorial, waiting to cross, when a car stopped right in front of me. The man standing a couple of feet away from me got in it, and I realised, with some surprise, that it was in fact John Howard himself.
I can't imagine someone being three feet from Barack Obama in the midst of a dispersing crowd without being aware of his presence, somehow.
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