My wedding day was the happiest of my life. Why did it have to be outside Australia?

11 November 2015 was the greatest day of my life.
I married the love of my life, my soul mate, my best friend and the man I will spend the rest of my life with – Liam Davis.
Liam and I would often giggle with each other at married couples and we found it a past time to make fun of those annoying couples who just couldn’t wait to tell you they were hitched.
That was until recently when we tied the knot in Carmel, California, on the beach with just our English bulldog Poppy as our witness.
Something surreal happened. While standing on the beach and looking into my husband’s eyes, I realised just how incredible it all was. We stood in front of each other and committed ourselves to one another for the rest of our lives. We told each other how much we loved each other and how much we meant to each other.
We cried and laughed and hugged and kissed. We made it official. We got married.
Not a civil ceremony. Not a commitment ceremony. A marriage. We got married.
After the ceremony we walked down the beach with our wedding photographer, Catie Watkins, and were greeted by local Carmelians who wished us well and said our ceremony was beautiful.
This was the greatest day of our lives, but one we had to have thousands of miles from our home city, Sydney.
And why? Because the government of Australia is ignoring basic human rights. The majority of Australians find it baffling why our politicians blatantly refuse to realise that marriage equality is consistent with Australia’s slogan of “a fair go”.
It’s heartbreaking to me that the all-too-familiar “We are one, but we are many” song is thrown into the cosmos at every event that calls for patriotism, yet that song to me is a blatant lie. The current government doesn’t see us all “as one”. Quite the opposite.
A plebiscite has been in talks for a while now which is set to waste millions of taxpayer dollars on an answer that has already been discovered.
Seventy-two per cent of Australians want marriage equality. Every scientific poll conducted in the last nine years has shown majority support for equality.
Yet why is the government not listening?
My wedding day was the happiest day of my life.

I married the love of my life, my soulmate, my best friend and the man I will spend the rest of my life with. It’s high time to government recognises the value of this as much as I do.