Penny Wong, Labor’s Climate Change Minister said on Channel Ten that she respected her party’s opposition to gay marriage law reform.
"On the issue of marriage I think the reality is there is a cultural, religious, historical view around that which we have to respect," she told Network Ten on Sunday. "The party's position is very clear that this is an institution that is between a man and a woman."
Senator Wong had also dodged a question posed by an audience member on ABC's Q&A program on which she was a panelist.
"By virtue of who I am, prejudice and discrimination are things I have firsthand knowledge of," she said on Monday. "When I entered the parliament, I did actually think very carefully about how to handle being Asian and gay and in the parliament, because it hadn't been done before."
Senator Wong said that before entering public life, she decided to be "absolutely open" about who she was. "Part of the reason I did that was because I thought it was very important to show that you should never be ashamed of who you are."
She went on to describe how herself and several other members in the party had "worked very hard to try and improve the parties position and policies on gay and lesbian Australians."
Gay rights activists have accused Senator Wong of selling out.
Same Same, a Australian gay website, quoted Australian Marriage Equality spokesperson Alex Greenwich as saying that he thought Senator Wong’s rationale for opposing marriage equality to be “deeply hypocritical.”
“It was once the ‘cultural, religious and historical view’ that women should not be members of parliament, Asians should not be allowed into Australia, and lesbians shouldn’t even exist, yet thankfully all that changed allowing people like Penny Wong to contribute to Australian society at the highest level,” he said.
“By opposing marriage equality, Penny Wong has betrayed gay and lesbian Australians, and by using culture, religion and history to justify this opposition she has betrayed the principles of tolerance and inclusion that have given her immense opportunities as a lesbian woman of Chinese descent. I can only pity Senator Wong for putting the politics of prejudice ahead of her own equality.”
Tim Dick of the Sydney Morning Herald wrote in his column titled Married to the mob: "Would you object if your party, after fixing some areas of discrimination against a minority group of which you are a part, refused to move on the last major reform for that group because of 'tradition' without any cogent explanation of why that tradition should remain? Not if you're Penny Wong."
He noted in the column that in 2006 she accused former prime minister John Howard of being more extreme than former US President George Bush on gay rights. A the time, Howard had the governor-general squash civil unions in the ACT. In 2009, Kevin Rudd then the prime minister achieved much the same end by threatening to do much the same thing.
Wong, who is Malaysian-born, said in 2006: "I hope there will come a time when this country can look back and wonder why some in this place and some in this government were so frightened of and antagonistic to certain types of relationships. I look to a day, to paraphrase a great man, when we not only judge people by the content of their character but also where we judge their relationships by markers such as respect, commitment, love and security and not by the gender of their partners."
She is the first openly gay member of the Australian Commonwealth cabinet, and the first Asian-born federal minister.
Online political editor for The Australian Samantha Maiden commented the attacks - some of which are racially tinged - from within the LGBT community.
"You might think the gay and lesbian community would back Wong up. Instead, the online comments section of the Sydney Star Observer [a gay newspaper] includes such 'rainbow' remarks as: 'So Wong'; 'I hope Penny is put back on her boat and sent home'; and 'Wow, for a woman who looks like Jackie Chan, she’s got some nerve." Maiden wrote in her blog.
Labor lobbyist Graham Richardson, a co-panelist on ABC's Q&A program, took over the mic when another audience member asked Wong why won't or can't she openly disagree with her party's position on gay marriage.
"You would not have had many of the things that have now happened, that she’s already referred to, if people like Penny weren’t in the Labor Party and weren’t pushing for them,” Richardson said.
"There are a lot of people in the Labor Party who don’t agree with this stuff. But give her a break. She’s part of a caucus. There’s a thing called cabinet solidarity and if she wants to break it, she gets nowhere. You’ll lose someone who fights for your cause. That, my friends, is dumb. Big-time dumb."
A recent poll on the Sydney Morning Herald website showed 64% of 44365 respondents are for gay marriage.