Marriage equality: Scott Morrison says he wants religious protections if 'yes' wins
Scott Morrison has issued a warning shot that he will be “very forward leaning” in arguing for religious protections if the same-sex marriage postal survey returns a yes vote, as the Equality Campaign and GetUp insist that their campaign is on track.
Morrison told Sky News on Monday afternoon it was “OK to say no” and those who opposed samesex marriage should “not be intimidated out of it” despite noisy campus counter-protests.
“The freedom of religion, more generally, is something that I feel strongly about and one of the reasons I’ve been fairly active on this issue in the past,” he said.
“If the survey were to return a yes ... and the prime minister has made this point, he would be making ensure that religious freedoms are protected and I can assure Australians that this would be on the top of my list for that bill and how it went through.”
The pace of the marriage equality campaign has intensified because postal survey forms arrived much sooner than was anticipated after the mail-out began on 12 September, with the yes campaign bringing forward phone bank events and planning a major door-knocking blitz on Saturday in response.
GetUp data analyst Ben Raue told Guardian Australia the campaign had made 300,000 phone calls so far using the campaign’s yes.org.au phone tool out of a target of half a million, with 200,000 calls in the last week.
However, of the 300,000 calls so far only 40,000 reached voters and 19,000 resulted in “meaningful conversations”.
The Equality Campaign and GetUp phone campaign is targeting yes voters – as the polls show a majority of Australians support marriage equality it aims to get out the vote rather than persuade undecided voters or those intending to vote no.
The yes campaign has used polls and census data to profile voters, yielding insights like that 80% of women under 25 support marriage equality and, although young men also support marriage equality, they are less likely to be sure they will vote.
Materials for yes volunteers engaged in phone-bank events say that the Equality Campaign has “purchased access to numbers from commercial databases [to] speak to people across the country”.
Callers ask if people have heard about the postal survey, support marriage equality and if they intend to vote to urge them to post their votes immediately. They are encouraged to politely end conversations with people who intend to vote no.
Guardian Australia understands from two campaign operatives in separate states and territories that volunteers in phone-bank events have expressed concern at the number of undecided or no voters they encounter on calls, despite the effort to target yes voters.
Raue said that of the 19,000 “meaningful conversations”, more than 75% have been with yes voters.
Australian Marriage Equality cochair Alex Greenwich said: “We know a majority of Australians support marriage equality and some demographics are more likely to than not.
“But we’re not limiting ourselves to any one group of people ... Calls are being made right across the country and people will be calling different segments of the population.
“Occasionally, a volunteer could come across a few tough calls but, for the most part, they encounter people who have got their ballots or are looking forward to so they can vote yes.”
GetUp’s marriage equality director, Sally Rugg, said the number of calls and volunteers so far has “completely exceeded expectations” and the campaign was on track to meet its target.
“The volunteers are having the best time and are returning back [to make more calls],” she said.
Rugg conceded that data to identify likely yes voters “isn’t perfect” but said it was “par for the course” to encounter some no voters because demographics vary in their ability to predict who is a likely yes voter.
Rugg said thousands of volunteers would take part in a doorknock campaign on Saturday, allowing them to knock together in centralised groups or to “knock their block” with printed resources showing them which houses to target in their neighbourhood.
Asked about whether the Equality Campaign’s polling confirmed public polling that yes voters were more likely to vote, Greenwich said he “hasn’t seen anything that challenges that conclusion”.
On Saturday, the Coalition for Marriage launched the no campaign in Sydney, with conservative politicians including Matt Canavan and Cory Bernardi warning of “legal warfare” against opponents if same-sex marriage is legalised.
The Coalition for Marriage paints itself as the underdog, despite in the first few weeks of the campaign having outspent the yes campaign five-to-one in free-to-air television advertisements.
A new website, The Equality Pulse, has been designed to measure searches for “vote yes” and “vote no” in Google trends in Australia to calculate which campaign is generating more interest. According to the Pulse’s analysis, current Google search trends favour the no campaign. A similar analysis correctly predicted the outcome of the Irish marriage equality referendum in 2015 but differences in the method of voting may “dilute the predictive power” of the analysis, Pulse acknowledges.
The Pulse registered three notable spikes in “vote no” searches: 9 August, when the government announced the postal survey; 30 August after the Coalition for Marriage launched its first major TV ad linking same-sex marriage to gender education; and a surge of 275,000 searches on Sunday after the Coalition for Marriage launch.