This Government Minister Copped A Huge Grilling Over The Marriage Equality Plebiscite
"Why the sudden obsession with keeping election promises?"
Yesterday the Liberal Party held an emergency meeting on marriage equality and ended up… exactly where they started. After two hours of debate, Turnbull and co. recommitted to their plebiscite, despite the fact that it’s unnecessary, unpopular, expensive, non-binding and has already been shot down by the Senate once before.
Of course, the government knows full well it has next to no chance of getting the plebiscite through parliament, given that Labor, the Greens and Nick Xenephon all hate the idea. Which is why they’ve starting hyping their backup plan: a non-compulsory postal plebiscite that has essentially all of the same problems as their original policy, but also relies on Australia Post not fucking anything up. (Oh, and it might also be unconstitutional).
Has anyone considered that the postal plebiscite idea is just a backdoor way to boost Australia Post’s flagging finances
— Osman Faruqi (@oz_f) August 7, 2017
Poll: how would you prefer your postal plebiscite vote be delivered:
— Alice Workman (@workmanalice) August 7, 2017
The (non-)decision seems unlikely to win the Coalition many new friends, given that majority of Australians, and even a majority of Liberal voters, just want to see this issue resolved. Even their own ministers seem to be struggling to defend it – as was made abundantly clear when Finance Minister and Acting Special Minister of State Mathias Cormann appeared on Lateline last night and copped an absolute grilling from host Emma Alberici.
“A friend of my daughter, a 15-year-old boy, came out as gay last week to his parents and was kicked out of home,” said Alberici, making it clear from the word go that she would not be pulling her punches. “Whilst you and your colleagues are bickering in your party room, aren’t you concerned about the message you send to young, vulnerable, gay and lesbian Australians that they don’t deserve the same treatment as other Australians?”
Cormann, naturally, trotted out the same old line about “sincerely held, strong views on both sides of the argument”, but Alberici was having none of it.
“Gay and lesbians don’t want a plebiscite,” she said. “Their friends and families don’t want a plebiscite. And when the wider public are polled on the issue and discover that it’s going to cost something in the order of $170 million and not be binding, they also don’t want it.”
“Isn’t it about time you were straight with the Australian public and admitted that this is nothing more than a political fix?”
Alberici also took issue with the idea of a postal plebiscite, asking Cormann how he could claim it had “any legitimacy at all?”
“It was not what you took to the election. What you took to the election was a mandatory vote across the country. This is voluntary and non-binding, and it’s widely considered a bit of a farce. Even Malcolm Turnbull, when he himself was head of the Republican movement, called postal plebiscites ‘an experiment in electoral science that flies in the face of Australian democratic values’.”
“This is not about us,” insisted Cormann, despite the fact that it obviously is. “This is about the Australian people. We respect the fact that there is a diversity of sincerely held strong views on both sides of the argument.”
“There were genuinely held strong views on euthanasia and abortion, but we didn’t have plebiscites for that,” countered Alberici. “Next time euthanasia comes up, will you put it to a plebiscite?”
But the most brutal moment came when Cormann told Alberici, “we keep our election promises”.
“Why the sudden obsession with keeping election promises?” Alberici asked. “You didn’t keep your promise when it came to health and education. No new taxes was what you said before the 2013 election and you introduced the three percent deficit repair tax. You promised no cuts to the ABC and you took $44 million from us.
“Tony Abbott promised you wouldn’t shut any medicare locals; all of them are gone. Julie Bishop promised no cuts to foreign aid and that it would grow in line with inflation; instead it was frozen which represents a $7.6 billion real cut. Then there was Tony Abbott’s signature policy on paid parental leave which has also been abandoned. Why is this particular promise so important to keep?”
You can watch the full interview public owning over here.