Foreword: Failure, Fear, and Alternate Routes

For a horrible moment, we thought we'd failed.The Chief Statistician for the Australian Bureau of Statistics, David Kalisch, had taken four minutes and six seconds to get to this point, before declaring:

And now the official results of the Australian Marriage Law Postal Survey. For the national result, "Yes"responses: seven million, eight hundred and seventeen thousand, and two hundred and forty seven votes ...

A pause, filled by the inaudible sound of queer activists' stomachs simultaneously dropping around the country. It didn't sound like enough-the Postal Survey had been voluntary, and while the total response figure had been reported earlier in Kalisch's speech, this was no time to rely on mental mathematics. He continued, "... representing sixty-one point six per cent of clear responses. That is, 61.6% of clear responses were 'yes'." He kept talking, but none of us heard...