The public overwhelmingly backs same-sex marriage and Tony Abbott should “get it done quickly and move on”, Richard Di Natale has said in his first outing on the ABC’s Q&A as the federal Greens leader.
Claims of discrimination at the heart of Australia’s marriage debate – against opponents of same-sex marriage, that is – took centre stage in Monday’s episode, which also touched on Dyson Heydon, tax and how to boost the number of women in parliament.
Di Natale said any plebiscite on marriage equality needed to happen at the next election, with a question set by parliament, not by Tony Abbott. “We can’t let the prime minister make a captain’s call on this,” he said.
But he added: “I just think we should have a vote of the parliament. We could get it done so quickly and move on.”
Liberal MP Kelly O’Dwyer, a vocal supporter of marriage equality, agreed. “The truth is I would have favoured a free vote,” she said, pointing out that George Brandis had explicitly ruled out the need for a referendum.
“It has been made very clear by the attorney general, who is our first law officer of this nation, that in fact that’s not required in order to change the Marriage Act. I think a plebiscite is the right way to go,” she said.
Playing the contrarian was Brendan O’Neill, the editor of online libertarian magazine Spiked, who decried the “ugly, intolerant streak” he saw in same-sex marriage proponents.
“Anyone who opposes [same-sex marriage] is demonised, harassed, we have seen people thrown out of jobs because they criticise gay marriage, people rejected from polite society,” he said.
One such victim was Tony Abbott, he said, who struggled under the yoke of this “21st century form of religious persecution”.
“[Abbott] clearly has a problem with gay marriage but can’t articulate it because we live in a climate where it is not acceptable,” O’Neill said.
Katy Faust, a US writer who was raised by two women but nonetheless opposes marriage equality, argued that advocates of the status quo needed to cease making religious arguments and “do a better job of making our case using natural law”.
“Our side needs to make convincing secular arguments using social science and natural law,” she said.
Faust, who pens a blog with the ironic title Ask the Bigot, complained that opponents of same-sex marriage were too often caricatured as homophobes.
“What that does is it shuts down a real robust debate. In our country, we didn’t have one,” she said.
“It was so demonised from the beginning that anybody that supported traditional marriage was doing so based on bias or bigotry or hatred or homophobia. It totally shut it down and people felt like they could not speak up.”
Labor senator Sam Dastyari was scathing, telling Faust: “I found it very hard to respect your views because I don’t think it comes from a place of love ... That American evangelical clap-trap is the last thing we need in the debate.”
He was just as fiery on the question of Dyson Heydon, the royal commissioner on the ropes over plans to address a Liberal party fundraiser. “Frankly, as far as I’m concerned, that disqualifies him and he should resign,” Dastyari said.
O’Dwyer said Heydon’s record was “unimpeachable” and accusations of bias “a pretty outrageous slur on somebody who is an eminent jurist”.
O’Neill shrugged, declaring the affair “a really rubbish scandal”. “I mean there are no prostitutes, there’s no drugs, there’s not even any booze,” he said.
He went further, declaring “we should get rid of” royal commissions altogether (“Tell all the people who have suffered childhood sexual abuse,” Di Natale said).
Nor did O’Neill pull any punches on the topic of targets for women in politics, which he said were “terrible”. “Women will never know if they were selected on the basis of merit or biology,” he said.
O’Dwyer disagreed: “We need to see more women in the parliament and only by having a target can you measure your progress.”
The mention of merit in the government’s ranks set up Di Natale nicely.
“I think it was Tony Abbott who said his frontbench was selected on merit. I have worked very closely with some of that frontbench,” he said. “I can tell you merit was the last thing that got most of them there.”
