The thing is, the conservative right is in power here too. And we have compulsory voting - insert rant here about how everyone who doesn't really care much gets swayed by short-term economic promises and civil rights suffer as a result - but we don't have quite the same prevalence of Christianity, and most Christians here are Anglican anyway (Anglican = Church of England = immortalised by Eddie Izzard for giving people cake and being generally quite affable about things like female/gay priests). Gay rights keep looking like they're going to get better and then...not. Because the government controls both houses of parliament, and they decided to intervene when my territory passed a gay civil unions act.