In 2017 on this day Liberal party Vice-President Karina Okotel delivered one of the more memorable moments of the marriage equality campaign
Australia’s campaign for marriage equality was long and drawn out but in October 2017 in the final days before all the forms from government’s postal survey were due to be released, then Liberal Party Vice-President Karina Okotel delivered one of the more memorable moments of the NO campaign.
Appearing on a Sky News program hosted by Patricia Karvelas, Oktel from the Coalition for Marriage criticised people who supported marriage equality saying too often they resorted to racist abuse, and because of this most people were keeping secret the real answer about how they responded in the marriage survey.
Okotel got into a heated back and forth with Karvelas after she argued that it was important the state did not give further recognition to rainbow families.
During the debate Okotel said she believed the results of the marriage survey would be very close, rejecting polls that have indicated up to 70% of Australians support change. Okotel said the idea that the majority of people supported marriage equality was “totally unfounded”.
Okotel said the evidence she’s seen was that a large number of Australians are publicly telling people they are voting ‘yes’ but in reality they are voting ‘no’.
“They’re telling everyone that they’re voting yes, because they are scared of the abuse that they face if they say they’ve voted ‘no’” Okotel said.
Okotel said people who supported the no case were being subjected to a “torrent of abuse” and were labeled as “homophobes” and “bigots”.
She said people in the no campaign who were from different ethnic backgrounds were commonly racially abused by people who support same sex marriage, while no campaigner who were white are regularly called Nazis.
The Liberal party member then went on to argue that allowing same-sex marriage would lead to an unacceptable explosion in the number of rainbow families.
On 15th November 2017 the results of the survey were released showing that 61.6 per cent of Australians were indeed in favour of changing the laws. Over twelve and half million Australians took part in the survey.
