Federal election 2016: Marriage battle for Labor v Greens

There are no easy tasks in politics but few would be as demanding as drafting Labor’s “100 Positive Policies” for the this year’s election.

Imagine the pressure: that rotter Malcolm Turnbull has called an early election, deadlines are looming and you’re frantically trying to pad the section headed “budget repair”.

That, presumably, was how same-sex marriage became part of Labor’s 10-year plan to strengthen the economy.

There are many arguments for reviewing the Marriage Act, some of them compelling. The assertion that this contentious measure will solve our budget problems is surely the weakest of the lot. Yet Labor boasts it will save $160 million by ditching the Coalition’s proposal for a plebiscite.

Only a pedant would point out that this piffling saving would be less than 0.05 per cent of Treasury’s projected net debt for 2016-17. But then the art of fiscal management is in many ways the art of pedantry. A nation, like a household, cannot forever live ­beyond its means.

For Labor the art of fiscal management is the art of fudging. In 2012, Wayne Swan promised the budget would be back in surplus within a year. Good on him for trying. Bill Shorten, on the other hand, merely promises to “set the budget on a more sustainable trajectory”, a form of words so ­dissembling that they would make a weasel blush.

The truth, however, is that Labor’s insistence that parliamentarians should decide who hitches in this country and the circumstances in which they hitch has nothing to do with money. It is an attempt to seize the moral high ground in an unwinnable war of piety against the Greens.

A plebiscite may not have been Labor’s preferred option but once the Coalition had proposed one, the only sensible course was to support it. To oppose a democratic vote is an act of condescension; it implies that voters can’t be trusted to do the right thing. It betrays the hubris Bertolt Brecht observed in cadres of the East German government: “Would it not be easier … for the government to dissolve the people and elect another?”

Despite the pretence that the same-sex marriage debate is done and dusted, advocates are well aware that opposition is strong. So strong, in fact, that they insist those defending traditional marriage should be silenced on the dangerous pretext it might cause offence.

“A plebiscite would inevitably provide a licence for hate speech,” argued Penny Wong in an essay in The Monthly. “Opponents of marriage equality already use words that are both hurtful and intended to hurt.”

Wong, in other words, wants to curtail free speech; those who disagree with her forfeit the right to be heard. “All silencing of discussion is an assumption of infallibility,” John Stuart Mill wrote. The truth of that aphorism has seldom rung more loudly than in the debate over same-sex marriage. Proponents divide the world into two classes of people; tolerant folk like themselves and the intolerable bigots who oppose what they slyly call “marriage equality”.

Those who fail to observe inner-city pieties on this fraught question are knuckle-draggers, according to the Opposition Leader, who used that ugly term of abuse last week to describe a socially conservative Liberal candidate who has since been disendorsed.

Labor’s dilemma, however, is that it needs the Neanderthal vote to win government. To insult the intelligence of the very people to whom it should be ingratiating itself is a novel electoral tactic and one that is likely to fail.

The supreme challenge in contemporary Australian politics is to bridge the cultural divide between the insiders who congregate close to the centre of the city and the outsiders in the broader community. Support for same-sex marriage may be widely based, but it is a low-order issue in the outer suburbs where traditional values prevail and 80 per cent or more are prepared to identify with a religion. The 2011 census paints a picture of that divide. One in three citizens in the Green-held seat of Melbourne say they have no religion; in Shorten’s seat of Maribyrnong on the other side of Flemington Racecourse, it is fewer than one in six.

In Tanya Plibersek’s seat of Sydney, there were 2666 cohabiting same-sex couples on the night of the census; in Chris Bowen’s western Sydney seat of McMahon there were just 51.

The same-sex marriage debate pits the two communities against one another in a battle for competing rights. On one side is freedom of religion and free speech; on the other is the supposed right to marry whomever one wants.

The conflict is explicit in the Greens’ policy to remove religious exemptions from anti-discrimination legislation. The consequences of such a policy are frightening; it would oblige priests — and for that matter imams — to act against their consciences if their principles conflicted with those mandated by the state.

Last week the Greens tried to goad Labor into matching their policy. Shorten, wisely, has not yet taken the bait. There is no doubt, however, that many in the party would be tempted to do so, delivering another wedge for Shorten as he campaigns in God-fearing electorates like Lindsay, Deakin and Petrie.

A plebiscite and a robust and respectful debate offered Labor an escape route from the culture war in which the party has become mired. Shorten may well regret his refusal not to swallow his pride, even if he somehow manages to win this election. In government he would be obliged to burn his precious political capital on social projects rather than on the structural challenge of reducing the size of government and restoring vigour to the economy, which he has so far largely ignored.

Besides, if Bill Shorten really believes that plebiscites are just taxpayer-funded opinion polls, as he told an interviewer recently, how does he explain his “positive policy” to change Australia into a republic? Labor is proposing — wait for it — a plebiscite to gauge opinion on a republic, followed by a referendum on the same issue.

Why does Shorten want to put us through this torture when he could Google the result of the 1999 referendum? For the record, the country decided to stick with the Queen by a margin of 1.1 million votes.

Nick Cater is executive director of the Menzies Research Centre.