A meeting between senior Coalition and Labor figures has produced no compromise on the same-sex marriage plebiscite, with both parties blaming the other for failing to propose changes to the contentious vote.
Labor’s equality spokeswoman, Terri Butler, said the dead-end meeting did confirm a report in Guardian Australia that the government plans to introduce so-called “protections for conscientious objectors” in as yet unseen legislative changes.
The attorney general, George Brandis, and the special minister of state, Scott Ryan, met Labor’s shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, and Butler in Brisbane on Monday.
After the meeting, Dreyfus said that “regrettably” the government “didn’t have much to say at all” and “weren’t prepared to indicate to us any change that the government is prepared to make to the form of the plebiscite”.
He and he was “surprised [the government] didn’t come with something in hand”.
Brandis said the government was willing to compromise with Labor but at the meeting he had asked on nine occasions “what it would take to get the Labor party to agree to support the plebiscite bill” but Dreyfus and Butler refused to say.
Butler told Guardian Australia that she and Dreyfus had countered by asking what it would take for the government to support a free vote in parliament but Brandis and Ryan refused to say.
Brandis said if the Labor pair had stated their conditions he would have taken the proposal to cabinet.
“You can’t have a negotiation unless one side acquaints the other side of what its conditions are,” he said.
The Labor leader, Bill Shorten, is expected to recommend Labor caucus block the plebiscite when it meets in two weeks, which has led to warnings from Brandis and Liberals in favour of same-sex marriage that the social reform could be stalled for years.
The shadow attorney general said he had received a number of “impassioned personal pleas ... from people in the LGBTI community saying they would rather wait a little bit longer for marriage equality than have this expensive, divisive plebiscite”.
Before the meeting, the prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, said: “It’s up to the Labor party to tell us what they propose.
“The ball is in Labor’s court on this issue. We’ve set out a plan.”
Two weeks ago, the government introduced its bill for a plebiscite on same-sex marriage with a total of $15m of public funding for the yes and no cases. It was rejected by a broad group of LGBTI organisations and marriage equality advocates.
On Monday Shorten said ditching the $15m of public funding – a key demand of Labor’s – was “clearly an impossibility” because the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, had ruled it out.
Shorten said the government had set up marriage equality and the plebiscite process to fail by making it “so ridiculous in form and design that they know it is difficult for anyone to vote for it other than members of the Liberal party”.
He called for a vote in parliament on marriage equality, describing Labor’s policy as the “middle ground” despite the government’s claim it has a mandate to deliver the reform through a plebiscite.
The plebiscite process has come under fire for a loophole that will allow third-parties to advertise without restrictions on content or truthfulness and concerns the government plans to introduce exemptions to discrimination law to protect “conscientious objectors”.
Butler said she had raised the issue in the meeting and Brandis had confirmed there would be “protections for conscientious objectors” but did not give further details nor commit to provide them before the Senate votes on the plebiscite bill.
A spokesman for the attorney general said: “It’s the government’s intention to release proposed legislative changes prior to a vote on the plebiscite bill.”
Labor has criticised Turnbull and Brandis for their continued silence over last week’s reports that Liberal party members were caught distributing misleading anti-marriage equality pamphlets in Sydney.
Turnbull said the government proposal included a “fair question”, “fair funding” and a “fair conventional electoral process”. “It’s been very well designed.”
Brandis said the plebiscite was “widely acknowledged to be very fair and very even-handed”.
On Monday, Nick Xenophon said there were no changes to the plebiscite that would win his party’s support and called for a free vote in the parliament.
