The attorney general, George Brandis, has said he plans to ask cabinet to decide on the wording of the same-sex marriage plebiscite in the next few weeks.
He also wants the plebiscite to be compulsory, and says the Australian electoral commissioner will hopefully provide guidance this week about how early the vote can be held.
“The question should be as simple and as self-explanatory as possible,” he said on Sunday.
“I would like to see it happen before the end of this year, so would the PM. Whether it is practicable to do that is something about which we will be guided by the advice of the AEC.”
In an interview on ABC’s Insiders program Brandis said that if there was going to be public funding for the plebiscite then equal funding ought to go to the “yes” and “no” campaigns.
Asked to clarify that statement, his office said he was talking about public funding to help the yes and no campaigns promote their arguments, which would likely come on top of the estimated $160m cost of running the plebiscite.
But his office also said if that money would drawn from other areas in the budget so it wouldn’t contribute to the deficit.
His comments about the way in which the votes should be counted also caused confusion.
When asked to explain if the votes should be counted as a simple national majority, or electorate by electorate, Brandis said the vote should follow “normal reporting requirements”.
“I think that the plebiscite should be conducted as closely as possible to the manner in which, for example, a constitutional referendum is conducted … so that there will be the normal reporting requirements.”
That means the votes should be reported electorate by electorate, he said.
The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, said that comment confirmed the Turnbull government was planning to undermine the cause of marriage equality to please the right wing of the party.
“This subterfuge allows conservative MPs opposed to same-sex marriage to defy a national ‘yes’ vote and vote against same-sex marriage, and justify that behaviour by pointing to the vote in their electorate,” he said.
“Let’s be clear – there is absolutely no reason for a national plebiscite to be counted electorate by electorate,” he said.
“It is meaningless without the context of a federal election. The only reason it has been chosen is to curry favour with opponents of marriage equality, to give them an ‘out’ from following the national vote.
But Brandis’s office later said Dreyfus’s interpretation of his comments about electorate-by-electorate reporting was wrong.
It said the attorney general only meant that he expected the AEC would record the votes at an electorate level, like it did on the republic referendum in 1999, but determine the outcome of the vote by the national majority.
