This was published 7 years ago
The same-sex marriage plebiscite is finally unfunded, so why is it still Malcolm Turnbull's policy?
Never mind a plan B; the government no longer have a plan A.
By Andrew P Street
There are so many things to unpack about the Mid Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook (how come treasurer Scott Morrison's adopted the same short-term-worsening-of-budget-followed-by-surplus plan that he castigated Labor for before the election? How come he's only just discovered that there's such a thing as "good debt" after we could have borrowed infrastructure funding at historically low interest rates? Why is he still banking non-existent savings from unpassed legislation from the Abbott-era budgets?) but there's one little wrinkle that you might have missed among all the bad news.
The Same-Sex Marriage Plebiscite was completely defunded.
Marriage equality marchers in Melbourne in 2016. Credit: Craig Sillitoe
Yes, Morrison's banking almost all of the $160 million cost of the unnecessary public vote as budget savings, bar the six million which it already co… sorry, what? The plebiscite we didn't have cost six million dollars? What for? Wow, senate estimates should be interesting next year.
Now, on the face of it, this seems perfectly reasonable.
After all, the plebiscite plan was killed in October when Labor, the Greens and most of the senate crossbench refused to pass the legislation on the grounds that it was still unclear how the vote could be binding on the parliament, that many Coalition backbenchers had indicated their plan to ignore any result if they didn't like, that it gave public funding to hate groups, and that it was going to create a poisonous public debate over whether or not Australian citizens deserved to have the same rights as one another.
The reason this is interesting is that despite all this, the plebiscite is still official government policy.
Indeed, Malcolm Turnbull reassured the HuffPo Australia last week that "the plebiscite remains the government's policy. Obviously we were not able to secure support of the senate… the Coalition's position is that the issue should be determined by a plebiscite and that policy remains."
Which leaves us a fun question to contemplate: if the government has decided not to fund the plebiscite, what's happening about same-sex marriage?
The obvious answer would appear to be the government has interpreted the compromise it struck with the Australian people as being "we won't go ahead with the plebiscite, and in return you people will shut about marriage equality forever, thanks".
The next most obvious answer would be a vote on the matter in parliament of the sort which a) the parliament has on everything else, and b) would have to happen anyway, even if there was a plebiscite. That's also off the table for the foreseeable future, since then it would pass through parliament and become law and everyone could get on with their lives.
(And we can say that with confidence because if the law wouldn't pass, the government would have settled this embarrassing and divisive issue for the rest of their term by introducing legislation, letting it get shot down, and then going "awww, gosh - we voted, and it failed! Darn! Oh well, matter settled!")
So what options remain? As it happens, former Human Rights Commissioner turned Liberal MP Tim Wilson gave this a think back in November, and it made up part of his Acton Lecture on Religious Freedom. Specifically, he warned religious organisations that the secularists will "win" unless the religious lobbyists start working on a conditional surrender.
"The first option is to wait until Labor and the Greens are in government, and we know what they will do: they will change the definition of marriage to be a union between two people. The second option is that those opposed push for the plebiscite again. Personally I think that is utterly pointless." And unfunded!
"The third option is that those opposed seek a hard landing by proposing a law that won't be accepted by the government [which] simply creates targets which Labor and the Greens will pursue when they are in government in the future… And the secularists will win.
"The fourth and my preferred option, is that the dust settles for the Coalition to implement a soft settlement which will take into account the concerns of religious communities and same-sex couples."
The soft settlement, as Wilson explains it, appears to be a change of the law that ratifies same-sex marriage but explicitly acknowledges religious concerns - essentially protecting folks from legal challenges if they refuse to recognise marriages on religious grounds. Of course, churches already set their own rules about who they will and will not deign to recognise as being really-truly-rooly married - just ask any Catholic grandmother who's attended a civil wedding ceremony held in a garden.
But Wilson's right: if the Coalition don't ratify marriage equality, it'll just happen when the government changes. Also, that lobbyist organisations can't prevent same-sex marriage indefinitely and, as he put it in his speech, that "marriage means something, and we should encourage it."
This, however, assumes that the dust gets a chance to settle - which seems as unlikely as the more vocal anti-equality voices in the Coalition accepting Wilson's premise that the Coalition might not be in power forever and ever and ever and ever.
In the meantime, Turnbull is presumably hoping that no one mentions same-sex marriage any time soon. And fortunately parliament sits for a whole two weeks next year before the 2017 Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras begins, so… ah.
Forecast for 2017: expect a lot of unsettled dust.
Be like George Brandis and grab copies of Andrew P Street's The Short and Excruciatingly Embarrassing Reign of Captain Abbott and The Curious Story of Malcolm Turnbull: the Incredible Shrinking Man in the Top Hat, and the Double Disillusionists round out 2017 with a year-ending podcast with APS and Dom Knight joined by Dan Ilic and Alice Workman!