You know the government are getting desperate when even Scott Morrison suggests that the push for a free vote in parliament is ‘fake news’. When Morrison says something is fake, it is almost by definition true.
Not to be outdone by Morrison, Christopher Pyne said that Labor defeated the plebiscite bill and likened it to “cutting off one’s nose to spite one’s face”. He then hilariously stated, “We could’ve had marriage equality after this Saturday, probably within a matter of weeks, if Labor hadn’t been so bloody minded”. When I read this drivel, I laughed so hard I almost spat my breakfast over the kitchen bench. While I do not expect Pyne to actually think too deeply about what he was saying, he seems to believe that the plebiscite clearly would have ended in a positive vote.
Not to be trumped (please forgive the pun) by Pyne, Scott Ryan stated that the government would not be distracted by SSM (!) and that he had spent much time working on the plebiscite proposal, and that arguments against it were reprehensible, because they effectively said that the Australian people couldn’t be trusted to conduct the debate responsibly.
Even Josh Frydenberg (who some people mercilessly nickname ‘Fraudenberg’) seemed to think that the idea of a plebiscite is not dead, despite his colleague Dean Smith saying it is.
So, what Pyne, Ryan, Frydenberg and Morrison are saying is that we can only have SSM the $160 million way (almost $7 for every man, woman and child in the country), not by politicians actually doing their job they are already paid copious amounts of money to do. If a plebiscite is the correct way to do such things, then why didn’t we have a plebiscite to prohibit SSM instead of the federal government of the time simply changing the Marriage Act. Couldn’t Australians be trusted to have a civil debate then? Or could it be that the Abbott plebiscite was only ever designed to delay things and to allow the religious right wing nut jobs to rally their bigoted troops to convince some gullible people that the sky was going to fall, just like it hasn’t in the Netherlands over the last 16 years, since they elected to have SSM.
Ryan effectively states that the Australian people can now be trusted to have a responsible debate. Maybe he hasn’t heard some of the lies that Bernardi and some of his other colleagues, as well as the Australian Christian Lobby have put forward as arguments against SSM.
Now that Bernardi seems to be about to leave the Liberal Party, Malcolm Turnbull could improve his stocks with the people almost overnight, by agreeing to a free vote in parliament. Personally, I think when Bernardi leaves the Liberal Party, he should join One Nation, thereby increasing the collective IQ of both parties.
Sources
http://www.blotreport.com/uncategorized/abbott-lies-again/
http://www.blotreport.com/uncategorized/acl-bigotry/
Recent surveys show solid majority support for same sex marriage. The simple fact is that the “government” (and I use that term very loosely in the case of the current clueless rabble) could permit a conscience vote of the parliament at any time. Turnbull has rolled over (again) and his party doesn’t have the balls to get on with something which is inevitable. Those renowned cesspools of moral decadence (lol) Ireland and NZ (along with Argentina, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Colombia, Denmark, France, Iceland, Luxembourg, Mexico, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, Sweden, the United Kingdom, the United States, and Uruguay according to Wikipedia) have done so without the walls of decency crumbling in. Moreover, despite the lunatic rants of Bernardi and others, bestiality is still not compulsory in either of those jurisdictions as far as I’m aware.