Culture

Government Bravely Avoids Voting On Marriage Equality; Continues Screwing With People’s Lives For No Reason

We are led by babies dressed in suits.

by Alex McKinnon  11 August 2015

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One of the great features of Australian democracy is how immensely popular pushes for reform by huge numbers of everyday people on issues that a vast majority of the country support can have the handbrake yanked on them by a handful of rich old white dudes sitting in a beige-coloured room in Canberra with no cameras in it. Why don’t these young people think democracy is any good, bloody ingrates the lot of them.

The ridiculously overdue Parliamentary vote on marriage equality was delayed this afternoon — again — after the Liberal and National parties put off deciding whether or not to allow a conscience vote on the issue, capping off a long day of Parliamentary procedural dumbfuckery that stands as iron-clad proof that we need to burn Capital Hill to the ground and start over.

First thing’s first. Liberal MPs met this morning, as they always do at the start of a new Parliamentary sitting session, to discuss when exactly to vote on the party’s position on marriage equality. Taking supporters of the push by surprise, Prime Minister Tony Abbott abruptly announced that a vote would take place in the afternoon, at a special meeting of both the Liberal and National parties.

That was a sneaky and not-very-subtle attempt on Abbott’s part to keep the Coalition’s opposition to marriage equality intact — the Nationals are far more conservative on the issue than the Liberals are, meaning that their numbers would likely offset the growing number of Liberal MPs angling for a conscience vote. That didn’t go down very well; Abbott’s insistence on denying his colleagues free vote on marriage equality offends many Liberal MPs who’d prefer an open debate, even among some Liberals opposed to marriage equality.

Education Minister Christopher Pyne even warned Abbott that it looked like “branch-stacking,” and Liberal MP Warren Entsch, who’s presenting a private member’s bill to legalise marriage equality alongside Labor MP Terri Butler, went ahead and lodged the bill in Parliament’s ‘In’ tray anyway, making it more difficult for the government to keep delaying the issue.

But Abbott got his way, and a joint party-room meeting was scheduled for 3:15. For almost an hour and a half, the media and people online waited on the Coalition to thrash it out and decide one way or another.

Their decision? Not to decide anything. At about 4:40, Trade Minister Andrew Robb told the media there would be “no vote” on the issue today, and subsequent reports have indicated that while the meeting will continue, there won’t be a conscience-vote vote today.

So to recap: after an entire day (and let’s be real, several years) of debate, the nation’s leaders courageously decided not to have a vote on how they should vote on something. Really inspires confidence, doesn’t it.

It’s difficult to pinpoint the most egregiously offensive part of all this — toying with people’s legal rights in a glorified version of schoolyard shits-and-giggles, or the fact that this kind of stuff is fairly typical of how Parliament operates. Marriage equality is inevitable, but we’re going to do this same sad, years-long dance whenever the government opposes any issue of basic decency for their own scrofulous reasons, because the way we govern ourselves is geared that way. We are led by babies dressed in suits, and we’re going to need more than marriage equality if we ever want to change that.