Dutton pushes postal vote for marriage equality
Image: Peter Dutton. Image: Facebook.
LIBERAL MP Peter Dutton is pushing for a postal plebiscite on marriage equality.
He has said he wants the issue resolved in this term of parliament, according to Sky News.
Lyle Shelton of the Australian Christian Lobby has also backed the idea of a voluntary postal vote for same-sex marriage.
Marriage equality advocates have said a postal plebiscite is inherently biased and unlikely to reflect the preferences of most Australians.
“A postal vote will favour the ‘no’ case because younger voters, who are more likely to support marriage equality, are less likely to return their voluntary postal ballots,” said just.equal spokesperson Rodney Croome.
Labor and the Greens have rejected a plebiscite, preferring instead a free vote in the parliament.
“I think that it is a much cleaner process than people running off to support private member’s motions or a Labor stunt within the House of Representatives,” said Dutton.
“The next best option in my mind is a postal plebiscite which allows the public to have their say.”
Dutton said if a majority of Australians were for marriage equality, then the government would be bound by the outcome.
Opposition leader Bill Shorten criticised the proposed plebiscite.
“The postal plebiscite is a policy for a government that has neither the intellect to know what to do, nor the courage to do what is right,” he tweeted.
What a farce as the people deciding the future of same sex marriage are those in parliament who most want it to be defeated. A postal plebiscite could be a dreadful result from the current round of coalition infighting over the issue: legal hurdles, potentially low voter turnout especially among the young leading to an impression that public support is less than it actually is, and the nasty pubic debate that the gay and lesbian community tried to avoid with it’s opposition to the original plebiscite.
So the last few weeks of debate around the issue has been consequential but where has our community’s campaign been? The public side to the campaign has been lacking and it is starting to show in comments made by coalition politicians about the lack of interest in change shown by Australians. The conservative pollies are saying that their inaction (and a plebiscite is a type of deferral) is justifiable due to it being a lower order issue for Australians. There is so much more that isn’t being done to present the case. Why is this so?
He has a small margin in his electorate and wants to face the next election with the decision out of his hands.
But do we want to be wedged into new religious exemptions or would we prefer to wait until the next election delivers a Labor government to do it properly? I say wait. The Coalition is going to lose out whichever way it goes.
It’s the lnp-ipa’s plan to waste Money & NOT allow Marriage Equality by any means possible.
Don’t believe a thing this creature says…
Sadly this isn’t even about denying marriage equality. The pro-plebiscite arseholes in the Liberal Party are quite genuine when they say we’d have marriage equality by now if their preferred plebiscite had gotten through the Senate. What they want is to go down all guns blazing. They’ll allow marriage equality as long as they get to hand Lyle Shelton $7.5 million of taxpayers’ money to run a last-blast public gay-bashing marketing campaign in the process.
I think (but am also probably wrong to think it, I admit) the best way to target the Lyle Sheltons of this world is to simply point out that genuine judeo-christian western democracies embrace same sex marriage (the list is now too long to type out) but islamist theocracies don’t, and Lyle Shelton should just fuck off back to Saudi Arabia if he doesn’t believe in judeo-christian western democracy.
Massive waste of time and money and furthermore given that it is being promoted by one of the most right-wing, conservative MPs in the Coalition it has been designed to Fail. Think on it! How many people will actually bother to vote? We can Guarantee that those opposed to Equality – people such as Tony Abbott, Peter Dutton, Erich Abetz, George Christensen and other ultra-right-wingers, religionists & other extremists like them will go out of their way to make sure they Vote and when the result is, as it will be unless the GLTBIQ Community really get behind it, a Great Big “NO’ the bigots amongst our politicians – and they exist in ALL parties – will use the result to shelve the entire issue and, just like John Howard did with his dishonest,phony, designed-to-fail Referendum on the Republic which failed they will use this to claim that, contrary to all those Polls which show 74% of Voters are in Favour of Equality, that in fact the Majority of Australian Voters are opposed to Equality for ALL
If you read the Australian legislation Dutton is wrong. The parliament is Not obliged to follow the outcome of a postal vote. It also is not known as a vote, it’s referred to as Postal ballot.
The government of the day is not required to, by law, accept the outcome of a plebiscite or a post ballot and pass a bill through parliament or use it to amend an existing Act eg the Marriage Act
We pay this idiot to be an MP and cant event speak the language or know what he is talking about.
Massive legal problems facing the postal ballot. First and foremost, it’s imperative in our elections/referenda that we have scrutineering of the count and a method for resolving questions about the validity of all ballot papers – this won’t exist under the proposed Dutton model. Whatever your view of the Liberals’ plebiscite plan, this fails the basic tests which give us confidence in our electoral system and it’s going to be laughed out of the High Court. It’s interesting that even Tony “Mr Plebiscite” Abbott is lukewarm in his support of this model.