HoQLD: Sarah

BY Laura Johnson and Virginia Cruz

“I’m in my fourth year of my journalism arts degree. So I started off doing Law at QUT [Queensland University of Technology], and I chose that because I was 17 and had decent grades and didn’t know what I wanted to do, and so my mom was like “you should do law” and I was like “okay,” but I didn’t like law particularly. I really liked journalism, and I also wanted to do something with journalism, and I couldn’t do that at QUT so I came to UQ because they offer a really broad arts program. If I didn’t have to go to Uni, I would probably just travel a bunch. But I like University and learning stuff, and I do want to be a journalist so I would still probably try and do that. I graduate in July so I’m looking at going overseas then and trying to get a job, either in the States, the UK, or somewhere else in Europe. I think I would eventually come back to Australia because I do love Australia; it’s my home and where my family is, but I think I’d like to go somewhere else for a bit. I think Australia is pretty slow with catching up with the rest of the world in political things. That aspect of Australia is kind of frustrating, because there’s so much potential and so many smart people living and working here and sometimes our government doesn’t really listen to them. It’s so embarrassing; it’s so humiliating. It is really weird, it’s super degrading that we’re having this survey at all. It’s super degrading that queer people here in Australia are literally asking every single person in the country whether it’s okay for them to have a basic human right. It sucks because Australia is a very developed, rich, new world country. It’s totally unprecedented because they couldn’t get an official plebiscite through parliament. A plebiscite would be a compulsory thing where people would have to go to a ballot and vote like in an election so they could get that through the high court. So they have made this weird, non-compulsory survey, which isn’t binding to the court and isn’t compulsory for people to do. It’s really bizarre.”