Tory Shepherd: Safe Schools rebellion can cause Turnbull as many problems as election timing or tax reform

HISTORIC legislation is being bandied about in the Senate — but everyone is talking about penis tucking. Well, to be accurate, everyone is talking about the Safe Schools program and some of them are linking it to penis tucking.

RENDEZVIEW MARCH 2015 - News Corp journalist Tory Shepherd. Picture: Peter Brew-Bevan

HISTORIC legislation is being bandied about in the Senate — but everyone is talking about penis tucking. Well, to be accurate, everyone is talking about the Safe Schools program and some of them are linking it to penis tucking.

Safe Schools is a bullying prevention program based around gender and sexuality, while penis tucking is something some transgender people do.

The two things are only loosely linked — those conservative MPs who are shaking their fists at the sky over Safe Schools found a guide to penis tucking on a website that links from the Safe Schools site.

In a political sense, the tenuousness of the link and the accuracy of the claims are irrelevant. Safe Schools is a war hammer; a blunt weapon intended for close combat.

The conservative mob is wielding Safe Schools to further rive the Government, to sort their own from the moderates and to wound Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull.

Leading the charge are South Australia’s own Senator Cory Bernardi, and Queensland MP George Christensen.

Mr Christensen upped the ante on Wednesday when he used the cover of parliamentary privilege to accuse one of the many people involved in Safe Schools of having written something 35 years ago that sounded like it approved of paedophilia.

On the back of that he kicked off a petition to strip the program of its funding. He says there are pages of signatures.

That this is politics was made starkly clear Thursday when former PM Tony Abbott signed that petition despite having funded the program when he was in charge. That politics is only a sharp gasp away from a farce at times is in turn made clear by the petition going missing.

As in, was lost. Mr Christensen’s office had to email MPs asking if anyone had seen it.

What was yet to be revealed was whether the loss was due to conspiracy or incompetence.

(We also don’t know what collateral damage to the actual students at risk there’ll be if those MPs have their way and get the program axed.)

This skirmish almost became the main story this week in Parliament because the backbench rebellion has the potential to cause Mr Turnbull as many problems as the election timing shemozzle. Or tax reform.

Australia is now all too familiar with what happens when a leader is being white-anted or straight out rebelled against. Mr Turnbull will need to show he’s better than leaders past at quelling it. Not least because if he exposes a vulnerable flank they’ll know where to keep hitting him. He’ll have to do that with one hand while the other does battle on election timing.

The Government’s push to change the way we vote for the Senate was set to go until late last night as Senators against the change threw in a flurry of motions, amendments, anything they could find to delay and obfuscate.

It’s broadly believed the Government wants those reforms through to clear the way for a possible double dissolution election in July, although senior Ministers, including the PM, say they’re still hoping for a normal election later in the year (and it seems strange to clear the way for a possible Greens balance of power).

Still, they are determined to make the changes, while the crossbenchers and Labor are determined to stop them.

One of the more important Bills that fell victim to the politics was the same-sex marriage legislation.

Because the Greens made a deal with the Coalition to try to ram the Senate reforms through this week, they stymied a move by Liberal Democrat David Leyonhjelm to debate gay marriage. Later in the day they moved to debate gay marriage, but were in turn thwarted by Labor who ganged up with the Government.

If you tuned in to the Senate yesterday afternoon you would have overheard an earnest conversation about whether it was more appropriate to talk about “bums” or “bottoms”.

At least it was an improvement on penis tucking.