husbands and husbands and wives and wives

Talk about living in a nanny state. It's not enough for the Australian Government to discriminate against its gay citizens by refusing to allow them to get married in their own country, now it emerges that the Government is wasting taxpayer funds and everyone's time in infantile efforts to obstruct gays from marrying in other countries where it's legal (ie., the Netherlands, Canada, Spain and Belgium).
Why doesn’t Philip Ruddock just call a spade a spade, and call his certificate-of-refusal-to-issue-a-certificate a "Certificate of Impediment to Marriage (Gayness)"?:

The embassy provided Mr Kakucska with a stamped "certification" that stated:
"Following the advice of the Australian Attorney-General's Department we herewith certify that Australian law does not allow the issue of a Certificate of No Impediment to Marriage to persons wishing to enter into a same-sex marriage." He got a similar document saying the embassy could not provide a Single Status Certificate.

C'mon, at least have the balls to say "I'm Homophobic and Proud of It!" Because let's face it, you are.
Still, even if our Government, for moralistic reasons, can’t bring itself to issue a Certificate of No Impediment, it should still be able to provide basic demographic information to a foreign nation that’s asking—namely, that one of our citizens is considered to be 'single/never married' in this country. Either a citizen is considered to be legally single in Australia or they're not. That's all that's being asked of our Government. And yet, we have this underhanded style of intervention that reaches all the way around the world to try to control citizens’ behavior elsewhere.
Since if a gay person gets married overseas, that marriage would presumably not be legally recognised on Australian soil anyway, I do not get why the Australian Government even cares?
To withhold information like this is a pointless strategy in any case. In the Netherlands case, the Dutch government accepted the certificates of refusal as proof of singledom (and our Government’s homophobia), and the marriage still went ahead. So the whole thing is just a childish waste of everyone's time.
Elsewhere, Tim Blair’s mocking Islam for having rules, acting as if its different in that regard from any other religion, or for that matter, even from living in a Conservative run democratic society. Rules just differ depending on your worldview of choice. For example, in John Howard and George Bush’s Christian worldview, there are rules on the specific kinds of genitals that are allowed to be in your underpants as you approach a marriage celebrant. Weird, huh? And this from the Government that Blair touts as being about the supreme rights of the individual. Doesn't extend to freedom of sexuality eh.

around the traps...
Tim Blair's attack on me, in which he argues that because extremist fanatical Islamists are evil, our Government is immune to criticism of any kind, by simple virtue of paling into insignificance beside madmen. Great argument!

Tim Dunlop thinks along similar lines as me but takes it further.