Cowards of conscience

The parliament should own this issue, the prime minister said back in May – well, not any longer.

Now the people must own this issue. But that’s not exactly right either. The melancholy fact is that Tony Abbott owns the issue, and he’s not going to let it go.

The issue is, of course, marriage, and Abbott is hanging on to it with the grim determination with which he held on to the monarchy back in the last century.

As boss of the core group of Australians for a Constitutional Monarchy, Abbott enthusiastically followed his mentor John Howard, who declared that a republic would take place over his dead body – a result many Australians might have regarded as a bonus, but Howard was never going to allow either outcome to happen. He moved the goalposts, switched the arguments and eventually comprehensively outmanoeuvered his opponents in the 1999 referendum in an unbending effort to maintain the status quo.

And so it will be for Tony Abbott. Warren Entsch’s idea was for a normal weekly meeting of the party room to debate his motion for a free vote; he expected to give notice in the usual way and that it would proceed in a week. Abbott not only preempted any final planning and preparation, but insisted that the forum would not just be the Liberal Party, but must include another party altogether, the conservative Nationals.

He was determined to preserve his numbers – if necessary he would probably have roped in Family First and the DLP, or perhaps the Taliban. Whatever it takes. And having secured his majority, he bound the dissenters with hoops of steel – this had become a decision that was, in effect, compulsory for the party of individual freedom and choice, compelling obedience to all its members but in particular his front benchers, who would have to resign their positions if they exercised their much vaunted freedom to cross the floor.

But just wait – there will, well, there might, be a plebiscite or a referendum or something, at an undefined time and place in the foreseeable future. And you could bet that if and when that time and place comes, Abbott will do everything he can to rort and distort it in the same way he did with the republican referendum all those years ago.

And that is the real absurdity of the situation: Abbott has denied his party a vote based on conscience, but his position is entirely based on his own conscience. He has never really justified it on rational grounds or even on Liberal grounds, because it is simply indefensible.

He relies purely on tradition and gut feeling: this is what marriage is, between a man and a woman, it always has been (well, it hasn’t actually, but near enough is good enough) and that is the way it must stay, because … well, because… well, presumably because he thinks so, or perhaps his Jesuit praeceptors told him so.

Free will does not come into it: it is, in the end, a matter of his own reference, driven by his religious training – his conscience, if you like. And, as Hamlet pointed out, conscience does make cowards of us all.