Same-sex marriage survey: Great fraud of postal survey exposed

Liberals Trent Zimmerman, Dean Smith, Marise Payne and Trevor Evans at the Coalition Parliamentarians for Yes launch. Picture: Kym Smith

John Howard has called out the great fraud of the same-sex marriage vote.

This is about far bigger issues than just changes to marriage law, with religious freedoms being put at risk by an irresponsible political class.

In the process, the former prime minister has launched an assault on the Turnbull government with a lethal charge — that it misleads the Australian people and fails to honour the values the Liberal Party is supposed to uphold.

Howard warns a Yes victory will lead to the erosion of already inadequate religious freedoms. In a considered statement, he accused the government of seeking “to wash its hands of any responsibility” for the essential protections needed after the ballot if the Yes camp prevails.

His message is blunt: the religious protection issue must be confronted before the vote, the position the Turnbull government utterly rejects. While Howard is too smart to use the word “betrayal”, his branding of the Yes case cham­pions as “completely disingenuous” leaves nobody in doubt about the gravity of the situation.

Howard also punctured the absurd pretences of senior Coalition and Labor figures that legalisation of same-sex marriage will not have far wider ramifications. With the Greens pledged to attacking religious freedom exemptions and senior LGBTI figures campaigning for the Safe Schools program to be made compulsory after the vote, the assurances offered by the Yes camp simply defy credibility.

John Howard. Picture: Richard Dobson

Howard is not just attacking the Liberal Party. His critique applies to all Yes case advocates who argue religious freedoms will be protected when they have failed singularly to advance or explain how this will happen.

The Labor Party is in the forefront of this fraud. But Howard’s criticism applies with force to the Turnbull government and touches an underlying sentiment — that the government just wants the issue off the agenda as soon as possible for electoral reasons.

The former PM says it is vital the government spell out before the vote what protections it envisages for parental rights, freedom of speech and religious freedom. Given the experience in Britain, the US and Canada, Howard says this has become a “compelling” obligation. His advice to the Turnbull government is unpalatable but Howard is correct.

In an unmistakable warning that this is an imperative issue for the Liberal Party, Howard says failure to spell this out equates to saying these issues do not matter: that is, religious and parental freedom does not matter.

The government’s insistence that its responsibility only involves freedom protections in relation to the wedding ceremony is increasingly recognised as deceptive and inadequate. The real issue is protections for institutions and individuals in the wider society.

This is where the impact of same-sex marriage will be felt.

The significance of Howard’s comments is the pressure they will put on leading conservatives in the Turnbull cabinet who back the No case but so far have been silent. Their silence will become an untenable position. “Same-sex marriage will not be the end of the debate,” Howard said. He warned that Labor wanted to review ­religious exemptions from anti-discrimination law and that the Greens wanted to remove them. In this context, the concerns expressed about religious protections in future were “legitimate”.

Frankly, Howard’s critique of the government could hardly be more serious — that it hasn’t dealt honestly with the people and that unless it comes clean with the public, it is expecting people to vote without being fully informed.