To avoid the spectre of your own commentary becoming completely dystopian in this dispiriting and mildly unhinged political environment, sometimes you have to look for a bright side.
So let’s start with a tiny bit of bright side on the subject of the same-sex marriage saga.
If everything goes to the (current) government plan, at least there’s an end point, at least we are dealing with something, rather than nothing.
Let me explain my reasoning.
In the event that events follow the expected path:
- The Senate will reject the Turnbull government’s compulsory plebiscite. Again.
- The government will then proceed with its complicated and convoluted means of running a non-compulsory postal vote via the Australian Bureau of Statistics as a data collection exercise (don’t ask, you really don’t want to know anything, apart from this idea is seriously, next-level, loopy).
- Australians will vote.
- Assuming a yes result, which is what opinion polls suggest we’d get, there will be a vote in parliament on marriage equality by the end of the year.
Hooray. How marvellous. An actual end point to the longest, most pointless political saga in contemporary memory. Good government starts today. Pop the corks.
Right, that’s the bright side, done.
I warn you. It’s all downhill from here. Two skis, no poles, collisions possible.
The end point I’ve just taken us to in four quick skips towards sanity and #auspol mindfulness is far from guaranteed.
We need to linger a while at the postal vote.
The first hurdle the government’s postal vote will face is a legal challenge. Marriage equality advocates have signalled that already.
The government claims to be on firm legal ground, but what if it isn’t? Government folks tell me the attorney general, George Brandis, has concerns.
If the postal vote isn’t on a solid legal footing and is struck down by the high court, then it is completely unclear what the government will do next.
Faced with their Big Fix unravelling, will the government then say fair cop, we tried our best, let’s just move to a parliamentary vote?
Or will this issue come back to the party room for yet another tortured internal conversation in order to manufacture yet another baroque means of delaying the inevitable parliamentary resolution?
What could possibly be the next resort for conservatives, who these days wrap up their deliberate obstruction in the virtuous cloak of keeping one’s election commitments? A postal plebiscite by carrier pigeon perhaps, or by smoke signals? A mass like campaign on Facebook?
You can’t see Liberals who want change patiently waiting that one out.
Assuming the government is on solid ground, and the postal vote is found to be legal, then there is another blindingly obvious problem of whether any result it produces can be said to be authoritative, or representative.
What if only 5% of the country votes? Is that really a yes vote? Is it a no vote? Is it an anything vote?
And what will politicians do in response to a low voter turnout? Will they pretend the result is instructive, even if it clearly isn’t, or will they use the opportunity to put the boxing gloves on again, and start punching themselves (and us, and gay people conservative enough to want to get married) in the head?
Conservatives have already split on the postal plebiscite, with Peter Dutton and Mathias Cormann pushing the mechanism, while Tony Abbott and Kevin Andrews have galloped off on a fierce campaign against it.
You might view the Abbott/Andrews insurgency as a positive sign if you are supporter of marriage equality – perhaps they sense a great progressive victory is only now just around the corner, hence the fierce resistance – or they might just be dead right when they say this is a dumb idea.
Marriage equality advocates also have to make a big call.
Right now, their eggs are in the legal challenge basket. If that disruption exercise against the postal plebiscite fails, and they have to organise to get out the yes vote for an ABS data collection exercise – that’s a challenging brief, particularly if the core of your change movement is young people unused to quaint historical artefacts, like letter boxes.
Marriage equality campaigners will have to make a significant strategic call.
Organise and field a campaign and win, (or lose); or protest, boycott the process as a farce, and write off the end result, gambling that Bill Shorten will win the next federal election in 18 months, and sweep up the wreckage?
