Corporate moralising is not a good idea

Listen up Gen Ys and millennials: want to understand what tolerance means in the context of the same-sex marriage debate?

Listen up Gen Ys and Millennials: want to understand what tolerance means in the context of the same-sex marriage plebiscite? Well, try these two old guys on for a start.

Sydney Archbishop Anthony Fisher on the Bolt Report on Sky News on Tuesday: “In one way or another lots of people at the moment are suffering vilification and bullying for taking a position on marriage that everyone in the world took only a few years ago.”

Former Coalition opposition leader and now director of the Australian War Memorial Brendan Nelson in The Australian on Wednesday, reflecting on the death of his brother from AIDS and the SSM debate, pointed to how different attitudes in World War I were from today’s: “You can imagine how absurd it would have seemed, as no doubt it does today, for a lot of Australians, for people of the same sex to be married.”

And what does tolerance not look like? Well, certainly nothing like funky Canberra business owner Madlin Sims who said on her business’s Facebook page last week that she had sacked a contract worker, 18-year-old children’s party host Madeline, because the Christian teenager had put the SSM No campaign logo on her private Facebook page.

The “It’s OK to vote No” slogan is very similar to a line young ­feminists used to use about unwanted sexual attention: “It’s OK to say no.” But Sims was having none of it. “Voting no is homophobic”, she wrote. Really?

Tolerance was nowhere to be seen in Hobart last Thursday when a man wearing a Yes badge headbutted Tony Abbott.

While much of the mainstream media, and particularly the ABC and Fairfax, have been sold on the line that No equals homophobia, much of the intolerant bullying has come from Yes supporters. This must have come as a surprise to many journalists. To its credit Fairfax ran hard with the Madeline story for two days.

This raises the issue of the ­biases of editors and newsrooms. Andrew Bolt, a long-time student of the angry intolerance of the modern left, has been on the case for weeks. Fairfax has been following the Twitterati into criticising Australian Christian Lobby head Lyle Shelton for raising questions that seem justified by experiences with legal changes in the wake of SSM overseas. The ABC has aired many spokespeople for “rainbow families” and mental health ­professionals, warning of potential suicides among the young if the Yes case fails.

Beyond newsroom biases the whole tone of the Yes campaign reflects the attitudes shown by political and media elites in the Republic referendum in 2000 and towards Pauline Hanson in the lead-up to the 1998 Queensland election when she won 11 of 89 seats with 24 per cent of the statewide vote. Why do activists find it so hard to understand you can’t bully people into supporting your positions in a democracy?

It was not John Howard’s deft splitting of the Republican movement that defeated the referendum so much as the elite Australian Republican Movement’s utter failure to understand why ordinary voters who could see the logic of an Australian head of state would prefer to elect their own rather than settle on one ­appointed by politicians.

In the 1998 Hanson Queensland election, ALP nightly poll tracking in the final week made it crystal clear the two big nights for Hanson’s surge came after separate interviews by Ray Martin and Maxine McKew. Queenslanders were giving the media the finger.

And if SSM activists don’t start to understand this older voters will do it again. The Generation Twitter crowd are being coddled by big business and big media who think prosperity and brand health will be improved by a Yes vote. I am not sure they are right.

The last census shows there are now 4.4 million Australians over 65 and 7 million over 50. The AEC website shows 15.9 million Australians registered to vote, so close to half are over 50.

The Marriage Equality website lists more than 700 large businesses led by the banks, retailers, disruptive online services and Qantas as supporters. The big sporting organisations led by the AFL, the NRL and Cricket Australia have signed on, as have the Australian Medical Association and the Law Society of NSW. On Thursday, Business Council of Australia chief executive Jennifer Westacott, came out strongly on the Yes side.

Presumably they think this is good for business. Yet we know at least five former state AMA directors and 400 doctors have protested about the AMA’s position and there has been plenty of blowback about the SSM support from NSW Law Society president Pauline Wright. Flip such support and imagine the outcry. Imagine the outcry if a big bank, an airline or a professional doctors or lawyers body had publicly urged a No vote. Now follow the analogy into media. Apart from 2GB and some of the News Corp Australia newspapers, the media is overwhelmingly strongly supporting SSM.

I have no doubt commercial management in most media organisations sees this partly in terms of a fair go, but even more in terms of appearing to have a modern brand and hoping to maximise audience satisfaction among the young. But will it? AFL chief executive Gillon McLachlan said on Thursday that the league’s ­decision to support Yes was about brand values but the issue blew up in his face by Friday morning as many past greats demanded the AFL stay out of the issue.

Years of studying marketing ­research tells me those who are being alienated by SSM bullying are likely to be older, avid news consumers who have high disposable incomes because of their stage of life. They are likely to be attractive to advertisers.

A practical example? Readers of Paul Kelly and many of this paper’s heavyweight writers, even if they are in the opposite camp on the issue, are far more likely to be of an attractive demographic, with high savings, good educations and plenty of disposable income to spend on travel and luxury goods. They are not angry Twitter users and do not approach issues like changing the marriage law in the way a 19-year-old who comes to a Guardian story via Twitter might.

Every business must do the right thing by its customers, but that might not be as obvious as many thought at first blush when they signed on to SSM. Some might just find the customers with the fattest wallets are offended even if younger patrons agree with corporate moralising.