Anthony Albanese on why he’s opposed to a public vote on same sex marriage

LABELLED “illegitimate” when he was born, Anthony Albanese knows about unfair labels. It’s why he’s opposed to a public vote on same sex marriage.

THE man who grew up with a sole parent in welfare housing to become deputy prime minister today condemned the attempt to enforce a single type of family.

It was an emotional and deeply personal commitment by Labor frontbencher Anthony Albanese to same sex marriage.

And in a reverent tribute to his late mother Maryanne, Mr Albanese also rejected definitions such as “illegitimate” imposed on people from birth.

He said: “Every time in the marriage equality debate I hear someone say, ‘You need a mother and a father and 2.2 kids’.

“To me, it doesn’t just denigrate families who happen to have two fathers or two mothers, it also denigrates sole parents, and it denigrates the whole complexity of relationships and families that aren’t done in a book, they are done with real people.

“And that’s why we should respect all families equally, and we shouldn’t be having a vote whereby others get to judge families, whatever their makeup,” he said in a reference to the government’s proposed plebiscite on marriage equality.

He was launching the book Albanese: Telling It Straight by journalist Karen Middleton, which covers how he was first told his father was dead as he and his invalid pension mother lived in Sydney.

Anthony Albanese with his late mother Maryanne and wife Carmel Tebbutt.

Then it was revealed his father was alive, and the book deals with how they were united briefly before his father’s death in 2014.

But the hero of the story is Maryanne, who bore him in 1963 when it was unacceptable for a Catholic woman to have a child outside of marriage.

“The pressure that was on someone though, to go to the extent of changing her name, adopting my father’s name, wearing a wedding ring, an engagement ring, telling everyone that she’d come back from overseas married,” he said.

“Then of course I was supposed to be adopted out because that’s what happens.

“It was better to have a child adopted out than to have them live as an illegitimate. I mean, what a word, illegitimate: not real, not legitimate. Seriously. Defining someone from birth is wrong.

“And my mum chose to defy that pressure and to keep me, a very brave decision that she made. So many other people of course were in similar circumstances. And we should respect them.”

Mr Albanese was deputy prime minister from June to September 2013, and before that a senior minister in the governments of Kevin Rudd and Julia Gillard.

He has one bitter memory — the move to cut single-parent payments by about $115 a fortnight.

“I don’t have many regrets about the Rudd/Gillard governments. I do have one: sole parents,” he said.

“But it was a decision it wasn’t possible to have an argument over, but it was a decision that was wrong. We should learn from that.”

Originally published as Anthony Albanese on why he’s opposed to a public vote on same sex marriage