Christopher Pyne has sought to hose down the controversy over a recording of him made at a Sydney bar in which he said that marriage equality would happen soon and that he had never voted for Tony Abbott in a leadership ballot.
The Coalition minister appeared on the ABC’s Q&A panel on Monday night and said he had “always been in favour of marriage equality” and the recording was just of him just telling a group of supporters what he has said many times before.
“Which is to have hope that there will be marriage equality in Australia, that it will come eventually,” he said. “The only thing that’s made that statement remarkable is that there’s apparently a ‘secret leaked tape’, which has excited the press and turned it into a sensational story.”
He said the Labor party had voted down a plebiscite and it was a “lost opportunity”.
“That remains our policy,” he said. “I support that. But that hasn’t changed my fundamental belief in marriage equality now going back from whenever this issue was first raised.”
A tape of Pyne’s comments was given to the News Corp columnist Andrew Bolt and included apparent boasting of the power of the moderate faction, and statements that he had always voted for the current prime minister, Malcolm Turnbull, in leadership ballots.
It prompted a rebuke from Abbott on Monday morning, who said cabinet members have “got to be loyal”.
“But, if he is to be believed on Friday night, that loyalty was never there, which was incredibly disappointing.”
Pyne told the Q&A panel he had been friends with Abbott for a long time and dismissed suggestions he was disloyal. He said he had won nine elections “under the Liberal banner” and had worked to “get rid of the Rudd/Gillard government”.
“And that was for Tony Abbott,” he said. “But more than Tony Abbott, it was for the Australian people, because I believe we were getting rid of a bad government and putting in a better one with Tony Abbott as prime minister.”
The host, Virginia Trioli, noted the evident disunity in the party and asked Pyne if he had risked “blowing up a very fractured party” with his comments.
“We’re not a Stalinist party, we’re allowed to have different views,” he said.
The political strategist Grahame Morris, who was former chief of staff to John Howard, said Pyne – as recorded – was wrong and the vote would not be brought forward.
He said there were still unanswered questions around legalising same-sex marriage, such as allowing certain groups to “opt out” and predicted Queensland, Western Australia and Tasmania were “not going to say yes en masse”.
Alastair Campbell, the former adviser to Tony Blair, who before the show had predicted he would be talking about Brexit, said his advice was not to have a referendum about anything “because you risk making catastrophic decisions”.
.@campbellclaret says don't have a referendum about anything. @Anna_Greenberg says the sky has not fallen so it's weird argument #QandA pic.twitter.com/Sfm1Zd5kxX
— ABC Q&A (@QandA) June 26, 2017
The US polling expert Anna Greenberg said it was strange to watch the argument over same-sex marriage from a US perspective, when they had already had all the same arguments.
“Guess what? The sky has not fallen,” she said. “It really has not created the sort of problems [Morris] here is talking about.”
Pyne also dismissed a suggestion that recent statements by three Coalition MPs criticising a supreme court judgment was a sign of increasing attacks on democratic institutions as was being seen in the US.
Pyne said the three had apologised and he considered the matter closed. He also suggested the tough on crime attitude trumpeted by politicians such as the three MPs was ineffective.
“We’ve had a kind of race to the bottom, of course, in terms of sentencing over the last many decades, as we have heavier and heavier sentences, and keeping people in jail longer and longer and longer. I don’t see the crime rates changing dramatically as a consequence.”
The show was bookended with questions about authenticity and negativity in politics, following a speech by the treasurer, Scott Morrison, over the weekend.
After a question about opposition for opposition’s sake, the shadow justice minister, Clare O’Neil, said most legislation went through parliament with bipartisan support from the two major parties.
“And I can think of one big example – climate change, for example – where Labor is reaching out to the government and trying to find a solution that will give some stability to this policy which has changed so much from government to government.”
Morris said the Australian public mistrusted authority and negative campaigns worked.
“We would all love to run a positive campaign for three years,” he said. “Nobody’s worked out how to do it effectively. It is the power of the negative.”
Campbell said: “You’ve got to remember that your system and our system is based on the idea that the debates taking place are instead of killing each other.
“So let’s start with the positive side of this.”
He said if the public really wanted politics to change they would make it change. He asked the public to give politicians “a bit more slack” and they might open up more.
