Australian Leader, Opposing Gay Marriage, Faces Party and Family Opposition

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/09/06/world/asia/australia-prime-minister-tony-abbott-gay-marriage.html

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SYDNEY, Australia — Even the prime minister’s sister is unhappy with him.

About two-thirds of Australians support same-sex marriage, surveys have found. Many of them are members of Prime Minister Tony Abbott’s Liberal Party (which is conservative, despite the name) — including his sister, Christine Forster, who is on Sydney’s City Council and is gay.

But Mr. Abbott has staked out an uncompromising position against it. And since the prime minister survived a leadership challenge early this year, the issue has been contributing to renewed discontent within his party.

“I would like to get married,” said Ms. Forster, who has been engaged to her partner, Virginia Edwards, since 2013. “And at this point, I cannot.”

Mr. Abbott, a conservative leader who is a polarizing figure at the best of times, is doing badly in the polls, two years after taking office. His position on same-sex marriage is only one factor, but it is one that analysts say goes to the core of his political vulnerability.

“His issue is his inability to reach out beyond a core group of conservative voters,” said Jessica Elgood, a director at the polling firm Ipsos, who added that he had “very little appeal to women voters.”

Last month, after a six-hour meeting, Mr. Abbott declared that lawmakers in his conservative coalition would have to stick to the party line and oppose a bill to legalize same-sex marriage.

“There was strong support for the existing position, strong support for the position the coalition has held since 2004, that marriage is between a man and a woman,” Mr. Abbott said after the Aug. 11 meeting, at which the lawmakers decided not to allow a so-called conscience vote on the bill.

Other prominent Liberal politicians were dismayed by the move. Malcolm Turnbull, a cabinet minister often mentioned as a potential party leader, said he would have voted for the marriage bill if a conscience vote had been allowed.

The opposition Labor Party has seized on the issue, noting that it recently pledged to make same-sex marriage legal within 100 days if returned to power in the next elections. Last month, a former Labor prime minister, Julia Gillard, came out in support of same-sex marriage, drawing scorn from some who noted that she had opposed it while in office.

Mr. Abbott, a Jesuit-educated Catholic who spent three years studying for the priesthood, has called same-sex marriage a “very deeply personal” issue and one “on which decent people can differ.” He has proposed that Australian voters decide the issue directly, in a referendum or a nonbinding plebiscite. He has been vague about how such a vote would be conducted, but he said that it would probably be held after the next elections.

“I’m just saying that if there is to be change, it should be change that’s owned by the people, not just by the Parliament,” Mr. Abbott said in a radio interview.

Critics have called that an attempt to dodge the issue, and Liberals and others have assailed him for preventing lawmakers in the party from voting as they see fit on the bill.

Some Liberals were unhappy that Mr. Abbott included lawmakers from their smaller, more conservative coalition partner, the Nationals, in the Aug. 11 meeting, which they say skewed the result. (Even within the Nationals, there is dissent: A youth division of the party endorsed same-sex marriage last week.)

Mr. Abbott noted that opposition to same-sex marriage was in the coalition’s platform when it won the 2013 elections. Allowing lawmakers to contradict that, he said, would have left supporters feeling cheated (or “dudded,” as Australians say). “The last thing you should do is dud the people who voted for you,” he said.

For her part, Ms. Forster sees same-sex marriage as entirely consistent with the party’s conservative values. She called it “deeply disappointing” that Liberals were not allowed to vote their conscience on the issue.

“Marriage is a special relationship, and that is why we have legislation around it,” she said. “It is the bedrock of our society. It creates family units. Small government, individual freedom and equality under law are core Liberal values.”

The same-sex marriage bill, in fact, was drafted by a Liberal lawmaker, Warren Entsch, a 65-year-old former crocodile farmer and Harley-Davidson enthusiast who represents a rural constituency in far northern Queensland — roughly, the equivalent of the American South. He acknowledges being an unlikely champion of the cause.

Like many who have come to accept nontraditional ideas about gender, Mr. Entsch said that knowing someone open about their identity made the difference.

“As a young man growing up in rural Queensland, I had an experience where a friend of mine transitioned from male to female,” Mr. Entsch said in a statement. “Her courage in taking this step in the 1970s left a lasting impression on me.” Though his bill was doomed to failure, Mr. Entsch introduced it in Parliament on Aug. 17.

An Ipsos survey conducted for Fairfax Media in August found that 69 percent of Australians favor making same-sex marriage legal, a finding that is broadly consistent with other recent polls. Rodney Croome, the founder and director of the lobby group Australian Marriage Equality, said Australian attitudes toward homosexuality began to shift in the 1980s and 1990s, when laws were introduced that barred discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation, among other categories.

“The movement of same-sex couples out of inner-city neighborhoods and into suburbia has also helped boost the public case for marriage equality,” Mr. Croome said. “People can see that the same-sex couple living just down the street should have the same rights as them.”

Mr. Abbott faced a challenge to his leadership in February, soon after he startled the country in January by awarding an Australian knighthood to Prince Philip, the Duke of Edinburgh and husband of Queen Elizabeth II. More recently, he has been damaged by a scandal involving expenses claimed by his political allies, including a speaker of the lower house of Parliament who resigned after billing taxpayers for unnecessary helicopter trips.

Ms. Forster said that she and her brother — from a close-knit family, by all accounts — have agreed to disagree about same-sex marriage.

And she is confident that if the issue is indeed put to a public vote, the result will be a foregone conclusion.

“The view the prime minister holds, that Tony holds, is increasingly one of a minority in Australia, and the majority will decide on this,” she said.