Family is the bedrock of Australian society; the place where we locate safety, commitment, and shared growth, and 'the people who make you who you are', in the words of Ebony, one of the stars of the 2015 documentary Gayby Baby.
As the controversy around that film demonstrated, Australia is also subject to debate over which kind of family is the right kind, and which versions are to be considered inferior or to be corrected.
This battlefield over family has had many manifestations in our nation's story; with particularly horrific consequences for Indigenous families purposefully ripped apart in the years of the Stolen Generations child removal policy, which many say is only being repeated today.
Misunderstandings and willful refusals abound in appreciating the many ways in which children and young people get the nurturance and education that we ask of 'family', while the still-idealised nuclear family remains the site of the most intimate violence.
Australian television, as Adolfo Aranjuez noted recently, is getting better at reflecting this. In Redfern Now, family is a refracting lens through houses, streets, the neighbourhood, personal history, and collective struggle; from Aaron, Robyn and Donna's household of dad, daughter and grandkid to partners Richard and Peter and their daughter.
In Offspring, family keeps multiplying as surprise siblings turn up and Billie decides to raise a new baby with the daughter of an old friend. In The Family Law, a family of five becomes headed by a single mum. In Please Like Me, a young gay man creates the lasting, nurturing bonds we associate with family, while the straight guy is unable to manage anything more emotionally complex than getting stoned.
As these recent cultural products demonstrate, diverse, non-nuclear and often non-heterosexual families have been increasingly the norm in Australia for many years now. In tracking these trends, the Australian Institute of Family Studies (AIFS) refers to 'complex' households, but even they admit 'complex' is a bit of a misnomer; noting that homes 'where children may live with: a single parent; a non-biological parent; step or half-siblings; ... or a grandparent' are 'very much in the mainstream'.
As for households headed by same-sex couples, they have increased from 0.3 to 0.9 per cent of all couple families. And it's young people who are leading this charge — both in that same-sex couples in this count are likely to be younger than opposite-sex partners, and in that acceptance of the equality of same-sex couples is stronger among young people.
"Against such a cultural and statistical picture, it is curious that government and company policies which presume that households are composed of a married opposite-sex couple and their biological children are still being made."
Indeed, public support overall for equal rights between same-sex and heterosexual couples has increased — from 38 per cent in 2005 to 51 per cent in 2011. Further, same-sex couple families are making us a more imaginative and accepting society — AIFS cites research that shows their 'sons and daughters displayed more open-mindedness towards diversity in sexuality, gender, and family forms'. By now it is well known that a consistent majority of Australians support making marriage between same-sex partners a legal institution.
The variety of our family forms is not that recent, either. I'm a 36 year old white Australian who grew up middle class in the suburbs of southern Adelaide. I can count on one hand the number of households in the streets I lived on which were always-already made up of a mum-dad-kids scenario. The rest were wildly, normally diverse — three generations between two nationalities in one home; a sole parent and her kids in another; two houses occupied by divorced parents, their new partners, and their children in yet another; an extended Indigenous family in another again.
In all this complexity the research on children's attachment, development and resilience regularly shows that kids need meaningful, culturally appropriate relationships with caring and competent adults in order to thrive as human beings, and that these adults can be pretty much anyone as long as they fit that bill.
Against such a cultural and statistical picture, it is curious that government and company policies which presume that households are composed of a married opposite-sex couple and their biological children are still being made. Even more so that questions like whether marriage equality should be made law are controversial. We should be making it as easy as possible for children and young people to live in the families that support them, and it is increasingly clear that such households are more likely to look like the families in Offspring and The Family Law than, say, the Flanders family in The Simpsons.
This 'new normal' should be embraced by politicians, policy-makers, and service providers as it makes for a more secure community for children and a more bonded community for all of us.
Ann Deslandes is a freelance writer and researcher from Sydney. Read her other writing at xterrafirma.net and tweet her @Ann_dLandes.