Coalition hardliners throw democracy overboard
Having bombed in the public survey they so loudly demanded, Coalition reactionaries have hit upon a play that shows contempt for their leader and looms as the most brazen betrayal of voter sentiment in a century.
Not since the hawkish prime minister Billy Hughes unsuccessfully foisted two consecutive conscription plebiscites on the Australian people the second of which was 100 years ago next month - has a mainstream political party schemed to affect such an immediate repudiation of the will of the people, once sought.
Backers of an alternative marriage bill under the name of the hardline Victorian Liberal senator James Paterson (who has actually voted ‘yes’ in the postal survey) display a triple contempt for the Australian people, for liberalism, and for the already tarnished prestige of Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull - tarnished, in large measure, because he had forsaken his own preference for change, in order to accommodate them.
Indeed, Turnbull suffered incalculable brand damage for adopting Tony Abbott’s plebiscite process, which was viewed by many Australians as a betrayal in itself.
Through various striations, his government eventually found its way to the idiosyncratic postal survey and, relying on the confident assurances of the prime minister that their will would be faithfully reflected by the Parliament, the people participated in droves.
The result will be known today, but all the evidence points to an easy dismissal for the ‘‘no’’ side’s breathless fear-mongering about children and the rent to the social fabric.
Australians look to have responded along the same line as countless, less expensive opinion polls had showed for years.
Yet, astoundingly, Paterson et al, will not accept that. They want to neutralise the operation of state antidiscrimination laws in order that businesses, individuals, faith groups and employers in all of these areas can legally discriminate between customers on the basis of sexuality – or even support for a particular sexuality via attendance at gay weddings.
They are not even subtle. The current definition of marriage would not be altered in their formula, but merely appended with some deliberately ambiguous words.
Turnbull’s government is already going backwards in the polls. Fortunately, the hardline position faces failure in the Senate. But other attempts to amend the favoured Dean Smith private member’s bill are certain. After all the expenditure, social division, personal pain, and deliberate delay, any further accommodations to a group that has shown such bad faith would be worse than undemocratic. It would be unconscionable.