Submission #2: “He pointed out that I clearly was not white and thus not ‘really’ Australian”

I had just moved into college and like everyone else was really excited to meet new people. Myself and a friend were hanging out in a senior student’s room chatting about what lay ahead of us in the coming semester when the senior student mentioned the fact he had moved to Sydney from Canberra. After doing so, he turned to me and said “that’s the capital of Australia by the way, foreigners always think it’s Sydney but it’s not”. After explaining to him that I was as Australian as he was, he pointed out that I clearly was not white and thus not ‘really’ Australian then began to quiz me on my background.

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Submission #1: “That is a very commonly held view in the community – that gay people make bad parents”

We were talking about a child custody scenario in class and one of the characters in the scenario was gay. Our lecturer said “This character is gay. How might that be relevant? Might it suggest that this character is a bad parent? That is a very commonly held view in the community – that gay people make bad parents. And in these types of scenarios, you always need to be thinking, what is the worst that the other side could say about you?” Later on in the lecture, he returned to the point with “Lifestyle! Here’s where you may be able to sneak in the gay question!” Nobody in the class challenged the lecturer on any aspect of what he had said. I was left wondering whether my classmates, like me, had just lacked the confidence to speak up, or whether they had thought it perfectly reasonable to suggest that gay people make bad parents, etc.

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