Qantas chief executive Alan Joyce is campaigning to persuade corporate Australia to support same-sex marriage, but he has kept out of the question of just how the parliamentary process should best approach resolving the matter. National consideration is now bogged down in politics within the major parties and politics between the major parties. All this is happening while Australia is becoming increasingly isolated from the rest of the Western world in regards to marriage reform.
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Since the last federal election attention has been focused on the Liberal party room as the community has waited for the governing party to allow a conscience vote of its members. There has been resounding silence as the issue became entangled with the declining fortunes of the government and Tony Abbott's struggle to hold on to the job of Prime Minister. Though at least one Liberal member has switched to supporting same-sex marriage while the party dithers. The Liberals have been given more than a fair go on the conscience vote issue and their time is up.
Now Deputy Opposition Leader Tanya Plibersek has grabbed the headlines by openly supporting a change in Labor policy from a conscience vote to a party policy in support of same-sex marriage on the grounds that the party should oppose discrimination in all forms. She says this should happen at the next party conference. The conscience vote was the policy adopted by Labor under Julia Gillard, who opposed same-sex marriage, as did Kevin Rudd until he had a last-minute change of heart just before the 2013 federal election.
Opinion is divided on Plibersek's stand. At the level of principle she has been condemned for an authoritarian stance which removes the right to conscience of MPs. Within her own party the move has been rejected by Joe de Bruyn of the Shop, Distributive and Allied Employees Association. At the level of practice she has been condemned for making a positive vote less likely in the Parliament because it will remove pressure on Abbott to allow a Liberal conscience vote.
There are also some who condemn Plibersek for letting Abbott off the hook by introducing a distraction when the focus should be on economic policy. Yet Joyce has surely scotched that notion by his intervention. In the eyes of this senior corporate leader it is an equality and "fair go" issue that must be advanced.
What all this controversy does, as my ANU colleague Shaun Crowe noted at the weekend, is to raise systemic issues about the way Australian politics is conducted in a two-party system. Legislation is normally debated on party lines and the divide is reinforced by heavy party discipline. Conscience votes are quite rare.
No one is ever forced to vote against their conscience however, as Plibersek's critics claim, because they have other options. These options include abstaining or crossing the floor to vote against their party's policy, a route taken by fearless MPs, as Petro Georgiou and his small band of colleagues showed in dissenting against the Howard government's treatment of asylum seekers and refugees.
But this happens less frequently on the Labor side, and that has long been either its problem or its strength depending on your point of view. It must be admitted that those who choose to cross the floor must expect to take the consequences within their party. They run the risk of being taken to task or even effectively ending their career. But history shows that that can happen to MPs after a free or conscience vote anyway.
Plibersek's gambit sets up three alternative ways of progressing the same-sex marriage issue within the Parliament.
The worst option is what is likely to happen. Labor will move to adopt a new party policy and the Liberals will use this as an excuse not to allow a conscience vote themselves. Both sides will play the blame game and they will both be to blame for the outcome. Any vote will be taken under "hard" party discipline; the closer the vote the harder the discipline.
A better option would be if both parties took a party policy position, but openly decided to take a more flexible approach to any disapproval or punishment meted out to those MPs who choose to buck the party line. This would be a distinct move forward for Australian democracy generally because the question of discipline and punishment is actually more important than the question of the conscience vote itself.
Several Labor MPs have already indicated they will cross the floor if their party adopts same-sex marriage as its policy. That should be their right without retribution. The same would be true of Liberals who crossed the floor in the other direction if their party continued to oppose it. The numbers of floor-crossers might be about equal.
The best option, however, at least for the time being, would be to have a genuine conscience vote on both sides in the Parliament. The time may come when the step Plibersek advocates is necessary to advance the issue, but that time has not yet arrived. Sometimes a system that is not working needs a shock to improve its performance but not yet.
That puts pressure on Plibersek, having expressed her view, to either give conscience voting one last chance or to advocate a new, more open-minded approach to party discipline. But it also puts pressure on Abbott, who should now announce that he will change direction and allow his MPs a conscience vote. That would make for a healthier debate on both sides.
John Warhurst is an emeritus professor of political science at the Australian National University.
John.Warhurst@anu.edu.au
