Claiming others’ triumph as yours

The sickening sight of Malcolm Turnbull clenching his fist and shouting “Australia has done it” was astonishing in its hypocrisy. He had caved in to the religious right wing nut jobs in the ultraright of the Liberal Party in agreeing to the plebiscite¹. That was only ever designed to be a delaying tactic put up by the pathological liar, Tony Abbott, so that the religious nutters in organisations like the Australian Christian Lobby could get a head of steam up in their development of lies, deflections and red herrings. As everyone saw, these were well developed when they appeared on television and in print².

The triumphalism of Turnbull was doubly sickening when he blamed the Labor Party for delaying the process, because they voted against the plebiscite. This is the ultimate hypocrisy of Turnbull. The fact that the plebiscite went down in the senate, twice, was not only because of the Labor Party, but also the cross-benches. Unsurprisingly, the government could not convince enough of them that this farcical vote was a sensible thing to have. All that was required was for the parliament to have a conscience vote; something that could have been accomplished many months ago. For Turnbull to even attempt to claim this as a triumph is ludicrous. He was dancing to the tune played by the right wing of his party, and was powerless to do anything about it. It was the ‘Yes’ campaign who triumphed, not because of Turnbull but despite him. The postal vote came up with precisely the same result that several opinion polls (not paid for by the taxpayer) had given in recent years. So at a cost of $80 million (over $3 for every many woman and child in the country) we duplicated something already known.

As Labor MP Anthony Albanese said when speaking to the Marriage Amendment Act 2004, which effectively outlawed same-sex marriage in Australia: “This bill is a result of 30 bigoted backbenchers who want to press buttons out there in the community”³. This still seems to be the case, and the plebiscite and its replacement postal vote were both just a way for the bigots to push those buttons. Fortunately, they failed. They also failed in their Plan B attempt to continue imposing their discrimination on others by suggesting all sorts of bizarre amendments put forward in the House of Representatives; all were voted down.

Sources

1. http://www.blotreport.com/australian-politics/plebiscite-for-the-gutless/
2. http://www.blotreport.com/australian-politics/no-truth-advertsing/
3. https://web.archive.org/web/20080605230928/http://www.anthonyalbanese.com.au/news/407/index.html