Senate committee warns against holding plebiscite on same-sex marriage
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Version 0 of 1. A Senate committee has warned the Turnbull government against a referendum or plebiscite on marriage equality, saying it is “squarely within the parliament’s power” to make a decision. The government, which does not control the numbers on the legal and constitutional affairs references committee, has a policy of putting the issue to the people in a vote some time after the election due in 2016. But the committee’s report, published on Wednesday, said marriage equality legislation should be introduced into the parliament as a matter of urgency, with all MPs being granted a free vote so they were not bound along party lines. The committee, chaired by the independent Queensland senator Glenn Lazarus, said a referendum was redundant because the high court had already found the change did not require a constitutional amendment. The report also repudiated the idea of a plebiscite - another form of national vote - because the committee heard evidence that “the matter of marriage is not one which should be decided by a popular vote”. “Whether the definition of marriage should be changed to encompass the union of two people, regardless of sex, is a matter which is squarely within the parliament’s power to legislate,” Lazarus wrote in the main report backed by the Labor members of the committee. The Australian Electoral Commission told the committee a plebiscite at the same time as the next general election would cost about $44m extra, rising to $158m if it was done at a different time. Turnbull, who supports marriage equality, has previously voiced support for a free vote of MPs to resolve the issue, and recently questioned Tony Abbott’s strategy of promising a “people’s vote” after the next election. On 12 August he said he favoured settling the issue quickly: “The reason I haven’t advocated a plebiscite after the next election is that it would mean, it will mean, that this issue is a live issue all the way up to the next election and, indeed, at the next election and, if we are returned to office, it will be a very live issue in the lead-up to the plebiscite itself.” But Turnbull, in an olive branch to the Nationals and conservative Liberals concerned about his rise to the prime ministership, has since defended the “thoroughly democratic” policy of having a plebiscite after the next election. “Each approach has its advantages,” he said on Wednesday. “One, I suppose, is faster and costs less. The other one gives every Australian a say and it has a cost; democracy has a price. Giving everybody a say on an important issue is surely a very legitimate and reasonable approach.” The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, seized on the Senate committee report, saying Turnbull had “sold out on marriage equality” and “abandoned his principles in a dirty deal to win the support of the hard-right of the Liberal party”. The Greens senator Janet Rice said the new prime minister “had a chance to show he wasn’t beholden to the more extreme elements of his party, and sadly he has failed”. A dissenting report by Coalition senators acknowledged a compulsory national plebiscite would be costly but argued it “would be invaluable in affirming the often referenced majority support for same-sex marriage” and guiding the government on “an incredibly divisive social issue”. Coalition senators Ian Macdonald and Linda Reynolds endorsed Turnbull’s statement to question time on Tuesday that “every single Australian will have a vote on the issue after the next election if we are returned to government”. But they gently chided Turnbull for excluding senators in his assertion that “we are just representatives and we are just 150 in number”. “Apart from Mr Turnbull’s poor mathematics (there are in fact 226 parliamentarians) we agree entirely with Mr Turnbull’s statement,” Macdonald and Reynolds wrote. In separate comments, Macdonald chided Labor, Greens and independent senators for setting up “blatantly political inquiries” and running them in an unfair way. |