David Penberthy: SSM lessons Labor and Liberals won’t like

WORKING class and Muslim suburbs gave both Labor and the Liberals some uncomfortable lessons in the marriage equality survey, writes David Penberthy.

THE emphatic win for the Yes vote on same sex marriage is, on the face of it, a unifying national moment.

When you look at the results in their granular detail, a picture begins to emerge of a fault line running through Australian politics. That fault line is framed around class and income. It is also framed around ethnicity, or more accurately, the religious and cultural convictions of those voters in our most multicultural suburbs.

It raises some challenging questions for progressive people who are blind champions of multiculturalism, as well as those social conservatives who found themselves playing footsies with unusual bedfellows in their campaign against equal rights for gay and lesbian couples who simply wish to tie the knot.

The Yes vote might have swept the nation but it came up against an unassailable redoubt in western Sydney, that vast swath of a million-odd Australians from the Anzac Bridge to the base of the Blue Mountains, who implacably voted No.

Keysar Trad of the Islamic Friendship Association toured prayer halls urging worshippers to reject same-sex marriage. (Pic: Richard Dobson)

It is a matter of fact that this is the most financially put-upon part of Australia. The home ownership squeeze that the rest of Australia is now grappling with has been part of life in western Sydney since the 2000 Olympics.

The second fact to consider: this is also the most multicultural part of Australia and, overwhelmingly, the home of Australian Islam.

It is easy and insulting to dismiss the results of the postal survey in western Sydney as a case of bigotry, pure and simple. No doubt some of it was. But I would argue that most of the No sentiment in this part of Australia was driven by a disregard for politics and a dislike of the political class, fuelled by the sense that no-one in Canberra is sticking up for their interests or focused on their concerns. I voted yes, but I agreed with Bob Katter when he said last week that it feels like our politicians have spent this entire year flying to Canberra to argue about each other’s citizenship and whether gay people can get married or not.

When you are paying more than half your take-home income on your mortgage, or when you (and your spouse) are working second jobs merely to cobble together a deposit, this often-showy debate about marriage equality would have no doubt sounded like an inner-city indulgence that was doing absolutely nothing to bolster your quality of life. The strength of the No vote in these western Sydney seats — every single one of which is held by Labor — demonstrates just how far the modern ALP has parted company with the working class on questions of social policy, or rather, the weight placed on social policy set against traditional cost of living issues. To this end the blue collar rejection of the Yes vote was less a statement of prejudice than a re-run of the Republic result in 1999.

Where things get really awkward for progressives — and also for right-wingers — is when you overlay the religious profile of those electorates where the No vote prevailed.

Same sex marriage supporters, including Ian Brett and Michael Collins, hear the result in Adelaide’s Hindmarsh Square. (Pic: Kelly Barnes/The Australian)

There is a 100 per cent overlap between the seats with the highest number of No votes, and those seats with the highest number of Muslim Australians.

The highest No vote in Australia was 73.9 per cent in Blaxland, Paul Keating’s old seat, closely followed by 69.6 per cent in Watson, now held by Labor’s Leader of Opposition Business Tony Burke.

According to a comprehensive 2015 study by the University of South Australia — Australian Muslims: A demographic social and economic profile of Muslims in Australia — Blaxland has the highest percentage of Muslims of any electorate in Australia, representing 22.7 per cent of the population.

Blaxland is also the home of the Auburn mosque, just a short drive from Australia’s best-known Islamic prayer centre, the Lakemba mosque in the seat of Watson. Watson has a Muslim population of 20.3 per cent, the second-highest population in Australia, and as stated above, the second-highest No vote in the postal ballot.

The state of Victoria voted an overwhelming Yes with only two electorates returning a No vote, one of them the seat of Calwell which according to the UniSA study has the third highest Muslim population in Australia at 15.9 per cent.

Islam was not alone as a religion in advocating a No vote, but it differs from other western religions such as Catholicism in its ability to galvanise its congregation into action. In our increasingly secularised and ambivalent western religious traditions, where people talk openly of being “lapsed” Catholics or admit to cherrypicking the good from the bad in the weekly sermon, the established churches did a pretty insipid job urging their flock to the No cause. Among these western religions, the No message from the pulpit was muffled or cancelled out by Yes vote campaigns from the Uniting Church and independent-minded clergy within the Anglican and even Catholic faiths who broke rank in favour of marriage equality.

Not so in seats such as Watson, Blaxland and Calwell, where working class rejection of the ostensibly irrelevant question of SSM was bolstered by a solid bloc of hard line Islamic hostility towards homosexuality per se.

It’s something for those religiously-inspired conservatives such as Tony Abbott, Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews to mull over. These guys ended up sharing an ideological bed with those western Sydney Sheiks who believe the death penalty is both a cure and a punishment for homosexuality. It’s also something for the lefties from the Uniting Church to bear in mind next time they’re organising a Harmony Day get-together with the local Imam. Can’t we all just get along? The answer to that seems to be No.