The 'kill the bill' protest in Melbourne (Image: Rainbow Rebellion/Facebook)

It’s amazing that the strident right of the Liberal Party has been so implacably opposed to renewable energy when its primary, inexhaustible fuel is recycled talking points.

Think of all the needless pain inflicted by watching fringe religious movements slowly and publicly lose the marriage equality debate — and then cast your mind back further.

Queer activist Paul Kidd puts it pretty tersely: “Debates about decriminalising gay sex. About anti-discrimination laws. About criminalising people with HIV. About gay and lesbian teachers, about public health, public funding for IVF, blood donors, the definition of marriage, ‘boys in skirts’, sex ed, accepting trans kids at school. It goes on and on.”

It’s a thread that runs through every speaker at the snap action to oppose the passage of the religious discrimination bill outside Victoria’s State Library; the endlessness of it all, the time and energy wasted on “debates” around your basic identity and the various “threats” it supposedly represents.

MC Ali Hogg introduces herself as one of the founders of marriage equality campaigners Equal Love.

“That campaign is over because we won,” she smiles. She surmises the bill as something concocted in the aftermath of the plebiscite “for the bigots, after marriage equality, so they could have a win”.

Roe Johnson comes to the mic first, her lips curling at the edges as she asks: “How are we all feeling?” It’s not gee-up the crowd patter — in the near silence that follows, she says: “Yeah, it’s a bit like that, isn’t it?”

Consider the legislative record of the Morrison government, what it has promised and failed to deliver over the past three years, and this sheer yawning waste of time they’re spending possibly their final days in Parliament doing.

It goes without saying how much disgust is expressed at the Coalition that this is happening. But this has played badly for Labor too. At one point, Hogg asks the crowd if they have a favourite chant and within 10 seconds the entire crowd is yelling: “One, two, three, fuck the ALP!”

Labor MP Stephen Jones put it tersely in his rightly lauded speech in the lower house this week: “It’s not easy crafting a national story that includes us all — but that’s our job.”

Labor could be doing the hard, inspiring work of communicating a vision, some idea of what Australia is, and what it might yet be. Instead, fairly and unfairly, it looks like it’s losing a game of 4D political chess against its own self-loathing reflection. For what? To avoid offending a press that will, regardless, sift through 30-year-old statements to portray Anthony Albanese as an anti-wealth anarcho-syndicalist?

Most dispiriting of all has been the winking concerns about alienating Labor’s “multicultural” voters, that phantom slice of western Sydney apparently holding Australia back from progressive utopia.

Korra Koperu explicitly repudiates this argument, placing the bill firmly in the realm of ongoing colonialism, an act of state severing children from their culture and identity. She calls on allies to take on some of the emotional burden of these debates: “This stuff takes up a lot of energy.”

Before Koperu, there was Tom Palmer, a trans high school student addressing his first rally — a remarkable speaker, all nerves and young intensity, gripping the mic and reading from a phone a few inches from his face:

Gay and trans rights are not a natural part of society’s progression, they are political battles won slowly. And without a public fight, they can be taken away.

There are several chants throughout the event, but the longest and most exultant by far is the cry of “Save trans kids!” roughly halfway through. On and on it rings, serious and joyful, that plosive expelling of stored air. On and on it goes, until it’s giddy and light-headed.

In the current moment, and the decades that led to it, you half expect people sanded down to nothing, hollowed out and bitter at the lives they might have led if they didn’t have to spend so much energy on this shit. And there is plenty of anger and sadness at this event. But more, there is simple human joy.

What I’ll remember is Palmer’s ecstatic grin as he stepped away from the microphone, that post-speech endorphin rush, engulfed in the biggest cheer of the evening. I’ll remember the quick moments of intimacy and comfort, the hugs, the squeeze of the shoulder when the speakers are done.

And then everyone — and by everyone I mean the guy in a wheelchair with a child perched on his lap, the people of all ages with neon-green hair and curlicued tattoos, the hi-vis and work boots and rollies, the immaculately turned out middle-aged couple leaning together, wrapped in a single trans pride flag like a blanket — seems to take a breath. Then they flow like disparate tributaries pooling in the street, and on they march together.