The new pink vote

According to UCLA demographer, Gary Gates, quoted in the New York Times:

"You are seeing same-sex couples becoming less urban, even as the population become slightly more urban. Twenty years ago, if you were gay and lived in rural Kansas, you went to San Francisco or New York. Now you can just go to Kansas City."

There's every reason to believe the trend in Australia is similar.

The 2006 Census revealed a dramatic increase in the number of same- sex couples in Tasmania and regional Queensland - far in excess of the more modest increases in Sydney and Melbourne.

Like their US and European counterparts, Australia's inner city gay community institutions, most notably Mardi Gras, have suffered a corresponding downturn.

To understand exactly how dramatic this shift is and what it means for the 2007 election, let's turn to an electorate I know reasonably well - the marginal, Labor-held, suburban/rural seat of Franklin in southern Tasmania.

Since 2001 several thousand new voters have registered in Franklin, many of them sea and tree changers. Of these, a remarkable proportion are gay. A local gay social group, the ironically-named League of Gentlemen (LOG), has a membership of 600. This is only a slice of Franklin’s overall gay population, but it’s a slice worth examining.

Many of LOG’s members are recent refugees from inner city gay ghettos and soaring housing prices on the mainland.

Many are small business people - shop, farm and B&B owners - whose economic interests do not necessarily lie with left-of-centre parties.

Most were attracted to Tasmania by a regime of equal legal rights which has leapfrogged the rest of the nation, and remain deeply concerned about the discrimination and financial disadvantages they still face under federal law. The light thrown onto this disadvantage by a recent Human Rights Commission report and news reports of reform in other western countries, have galvanised levels of support for change that I've never before seen amongst these and other gay Australians.