Cabinet ministers are at loggerheads over same-sex marriage, with Scott Morrison insisting there is no legal barrier to holding a referendum on the issue.
Despite being slapped down on Thursday by the attorney general, George Brandis, the social services minister dug in on Friday. “There is no legal barrier to this matter being addressed in a referendum,” Morrison told reporters.
And in a pointed a slap back at Brandis, he said: “Lawyers will always have a lot of views on a lot of things going into the entrails on these sorts of things. I’m not interested in a lawyer’s picnic side of things on this issue.”
Earlier on Friday the manager of government business, Christopher Pyne, joined Brandis in arguing there was no legal basis for resolving the issue via a referendum.
“A referendum would cost a great deal of money, in fact, only to achieve no outcome because there is no legal basis for a referendum,” Pyne told the Nine Network.
The rolling brawl caps off a terrible week for the Abbott government, with the instability set to roll on into next week’s new parliamentary session.
This past week has seen a spectacular split emerge between Tony Abbott and Pyne, his chief parliamentary tactician – with Pyne accusing the prime minister of acting like a “branch stacker” during the special party-room meeting to resolve the same-sex marriage fight.
Both the same-sex marriage debate and the election of the new Speaker, Tony Smith, saw various power blocs within the government exert influence in a manner many government MPs see as a proxy for the government’s lingering leadership tensions.
Morrison’s group was pivotal in installing Smith as Speaker, and some colleagues view his continuing public provocations on the referendum as an effort to consolidate his position with the right as an alternative to Abbott.
Some Coalition MPs view the government’s current position – open warfare, a breakdown in cabinet government and poor decision-making – as completely untenable.
But some other MPs believe Abbott will actually consolidate his position after the dramas of the week because the various alternatives to the prime minister have now picked up the cudgels against one another.
It is unclear how, in a procedural sense, the government will resolve the form of the so-called “people’s vote” on same-sex marriage.
One MP predicted there would be “chaos” if the fight over the referendum versus a plebiscite resumed again next week in the Coalition party room.
In late 2013 the high court made it clear the power to legislate for marriage resided in the federal parliament.
The prime minister told reporters on Friday the Coalition “has a very clear position” in relation to same-sex marriage.
“This should go to the people in the next term of parliament and so what we did this week was we kept faith with the electorate because we had made certain commitments pre-election,” Abbott said.
MPs vary in their accounts of whether the party room this week actually made a concrete decision about how to proceed.
Some say there was no decision to pursue a “people’s vote”, only a prime minister’s summation suggesting that as an option. Others say there was a clear decision and it was consistent with what Abbott has said publicly.
The communications minister, Malcolm Turnbull, cast doubt on whether any public poll would ultimately go ahead.
“As far as consulting the public through a plebiscite, that’s not yet determined,” he said. “The mechanism’s not yet determined, the timing of it is not yet determined.”
Opponents of same-sex marriage, like Morrison, are pushing for the referendum because it raises the bar for approval. Referendums require a majority of people in a majority of states to be carried.
Morrison said the double majority was needed because the depth of feeling on the issue was so great, and that altering the Marriage Act – which now limits marriage to being between a man and a woman – is a “significant” social change.
Labor on Friday declared the government was tearing itself apart over same-sex marriage.
“What we have seen this week is dysfunction from the Coalition,” the shadow infrastructure minister, Anthony Albanese, told Channel Nine. “It’s a tragedy in my view that the Liberal party of Robert Menzies set up on the basis of individualism has resorted to basically rorting their own party-room processes.”
