Comedian John Oliver has discovered Australia’s $122m voluntary postal survey on marriage equality and is baffled by the process and some of the arguments by the no campaign.
Oliver took aim at the survey in a segment for his television show Last Week Tonight, which aired in Australia on Monday, calling it “a dispiriting, ultimately pointless process” and “the weirdest waste of Australian money since every Baz Luhrmann movie ever made”.
Opening by calling Australia “the Outback Steakhouse of countries”, Oliver said the survey was an “odd thing to do”, particularly when successive polls show that around two-thirds of the voting population support legalising marriage equality.
He then turned his attention to the no campaign, which he said was both “truly toxic” and “ridiculous”.
Of particular interest was an argument made on Sky News by backbench Liberal MP Kevin Andrews, who dismissed the need for marriage equality by saying there were “all sorts of affectionate relationships” that were not called marriage.
We hope Kevin Andrews' cycling mates can teach him how to backpedal.#TheWeekly pic.twitter.com/J114IvbvMI
— The Weekly (@theweeklytv) August 16, 2017
Andrews, who incidentally was named Natural family Man of the Year in 2014, elaborated his point by saying: “I have an affectionate relationship with my cycling mates, we go cycling on the weekends, but that’s not marriage.”
Oliver had the same reaction as many Australians to this comparison, namely: it’s not the same thing at all.
Kevin Andrews thinks committed gay couples are just like good friends. Kevin, I have news for you: We fuck.
— Rob Stott (@Rob_Stott) August 14, 2017
“Yeah, I mean, we do fuck,” Oliver said, affecting a broad Australian accent. “We finish cycling, we slowly peel our cycling clothes off by the side of the bucolic country road and we fuck, but that’s not marriage, that’s fucking your cycling mates ... You cycle, you fuck. You cycle, you fuck. It’s not marriage though.”
He also ridiculed no campaigner Sophie York, who suggested the “marriage” in gay marriage be replaced with another word, like “garriage”.
“That is a stupid word,” Oliver said. “Except in the very rare case of a marriage between two men and named Gary, in which case, obviously they should be getting ‘garried’.”
He also expressed sympathy to Tasmanian anarchist Astro Labe, alias DJ Funknukl, who explained that he had head-butted former prime minister and marriage equality opponent Tony Abbott on the streets of Hobart not for his views on marriage equality, but because he thought: “There’s Tony Abbott, I’m going to head-butt him.”
“I am in no way condoning Tony Abbott being attacked,” Oliver said. “What I will say is: thinking to yourself ‘there’s Tony Abbott, I’m going to head-butt him’, is entirely natural. It’s an automatic human response.”
Astro Labe has been charged with causing harm to a public official, an offence that carries a maximum penalty of 10 years in prison.
However Oliver drew the line at supporting Macklemore, who performed his 2013 marriage equality anthem Same Love to a backdrop of rainbow-coloured fireworks at the NRL grand final earlier this month after opponents of marriage equality, led by Abbott, failed in a campaign to have the rapper either replaced as a performer or balanced out by someone performing a song in favour of “traditional” marriage.
The controversy surrounding his performance, which was booked months before the postal survey was announced, saw Same Love rocket to the top of the Australian iTunes chart. Macklemore pledged to donate the Australian proceeds from the song to the marriage equality campaign.
“OK, so, that is putting me in a bit of a tough position because I do support gay marriage but I refuse to ever say: let Macklemore perform,” Oliver said.
Voting in the postal survey closes on 7 November. The results will be published on 15 November.
