Six hours.
It’s a bloody long time when you think about it.
If you were to drive from Sydney to Canberra, turn around and drive straight back to Sydney … it would take six hours.
If you were to watch every episode of Fawlty Towers ever made back-to-back … it would take you six hours.
If you watched a full day of test cricket (that’s if an Australian team can last a whole day) and skipped the lunch and tea break… it would take six hours.
Alternatively, if you wanted to dash the hopes of the many people waiting anxiously for marriage equality to be approved, it takes about six hours.
That’s how long the Coalition Party room debated the matter of a conscience vote over marriage equality on Tuesday night.
Note that they weren’t even voting on whether they supported marriage equality. They were debating whether it should be allowed to go to a conscience vote.
The result was 66 against a conscience vote, 33 in favour.
Those are some pretty emphatic numbers that underline a steely and unflinching determination to not only block same sex marriage but also to block individuals having their say on the matter.
Many would say that every vote should be a conscience vote. Who in their right mind, or with any moral compass, would vote against their own conscience? Would that it were so.
The reality of politics is that you vote with your team. Some politicians see that as loyalty, presumably forgetting that their fealty is owed to their voters.
But in defence of that approach… the “we vote as a pack” approach... political parties run for office with particular platforms and policies. If you vote for someone from a particular party, you have the right to expect they will act in accordance with those policies.
I’ll illustrate that point with a frivolous example.
Pretend you vote for a party that supports putting more pink Clinkers in every pack. If you vote for that party and they suddenly back more green Clinkers in every bag, you feel lied. They gave you a promise and broke it, and you will probably park your vote elsewhere next time.
Well this isn’t that.
Unlike things like the RET, NBN and workplace reforms… some issues are regarded as being especially personal. They may involve a moral stance, or matters of personal belief and ideology.
These are areas that parties often don’t tie themselves to, and allow a conscience vote on. A conscience vote is essentially something that a Party decides not to push a particular barrow about.
So if same-sex marriage doesn’t fit that bill… if it’s not smack bang in the middle of what constitutes a conscience vote, then what the bloody hell is?
Whether you wholeheartedly support same-sex marriage, or whole-heartedly oppose same sex marriage, surely a conscience vote is for you. It doesn’t favour either side. People walk into their metaphoric booth with their belief, cast their votes, and at the end you tally up the votes and the majority holds sway.
I’ll say that again. A conscience vote doesn’t favour either side of any debate.
So you would only block it if you felt confident it wouldn’t deliver the results you personally want.
The mammoth six hour party room vote (and incidentally, do you still call it a Party room – when the Nats were dragged in to bolster the “no” vote that may not have been clearly enough delivered by just the Libs) reveals some interesting facts.
Firstly, the fact that it went for six hours showed that there were some brave souls in that meeting flailing away, tilting at windmills and fighting the odds. The meeting would have been over in minutes if everyone was of a like mind, so before this turns into a “Libs=evil” session, clearly quite a few Libs fought at length and heroically to keep the debate going for six hours.
Secondly, however, it reveals the determination to get that result by those who held sway.
It would be very interesting to see who voted what way… ie for the pollies to own their votes. Especially those that won’t offer opinions and hide behind the cover of glib catch phrases like “it’s not for me to decide” that only make sense if those politicians keep their opinions to themselves on most other matters.
Defending the Party room vote, and its result, Tony Abbott said that it would be inappropriate for the government to legislate on the issue without getting the go ahead from the Australian people, which he offered to seek at the next election.
Here’s why that’s rubbish.
"For evil to succeed, all that is required is for good men to do nothing."
One of the greatest phrases ever constructed in the English language, that one, and it’s ascribed to a gentleman called Edmund Burke.
You can argue the toss about what does or doesn’t constitute evil, so perhaps let’s paraphrase it for the more pedantic among us. It means all that is required to stop something wrong from happening, is that good people get involved and do something.
Or put it this way. If you see an injustice, you don't hide behind political mechanics and procedures. You don't let it continue a minute longer, and you do it knowing your electorate expects opposition to injustice as a bare minimum
