Finally, it is over and the results are in. The result of the same-sex postal survey is entirely predictable and mirrors polls taken over the last five years. The question remains, why has the will of a large majority of the people been ignored by the parliament for so long?
This has been an entirely unnecessary vox pop of the Australian people on a question so few are actually invested in. It has been ugly and divisive. The best thing we can say about it is at last it is done.
It should never have happened. The parliament should have acted or indeed it might not have acted and we would all be a lot better off than we are today. But the political needs of the Coalition had to be sated and so the Australian Bureau of Statistics was dragged into oversee a $122 million non-binding, voluntary postal survey that may yet come to little or nothing.
The cost of it has to be counted more than in simple dollar terms. It has to be measured somehow in more nebulous but more important ways. The loss of national unity, a lid lifted on bigotry and prejudice where discrimination against one group of people was openly countenanced by community leaders.
Full column here.
The coalition should apologise to all Australians and refund the $122 million to sort out their own internal mess. Patterson is a kid who has come trough the IPA has virtually No real life experience. The IPA are a very dangerous very wealthy tax free organisation.
He has similar experience to most Labor politicians; Uni….Unions…..parliament. IPA equals Getup by the way. Can’t you at least see Dismayed that BOTH sides play the game, not just the Cons. In the development of emotional intelligence one of the first character traits required is pragmatism. Read up a little on emotional intelligence and pragmatism in all honestly you will be the better for it. It could be life changing.
I think the Australia Institute ida the IPA equivalent
No Surprises. The usual cognitive bias from you. I am pretty sure I introduced you to “emotional intelligence” a couple of years ago and you had a go at me back then about that powder blue hand bag stuff and wet lettuce leaf stuff. Your memory is slipping. Blunt razor’s are dangerous and ineffective for their design purpose.
I actually am a presenter on emotional intelligence with regard to Command for a couple of Masters courses Dismayed. One of the reasons I am currently in India. But no doubt you introduced me to the subject. I mean you said it so it must be true.
Yeah, and trade unions are harmless, impoverished organisations who are also tax free. Especially the CFMEU.
Can’t really agree with you about most of this, Jack. As a Yes voter I’m glad there has been an amazing response (by the normal standards of voluntary polls) and even more so that the numbers have come down on the Yes side in every State and Territory with a bare handful of electorates saying No.
There are still some people who are claiming the thing invalid and not to be trusted but they would generally be satisfied with nothing less than Jesus Christ himself descending on a beam of golden light to give his blessing before they would accept it.
The main thing that disappointed me was the generally obstructive, negative approach to the poll taken by too many on the Yes side. Instead of having the courage of their convictions and attacking the issue like civil-rights tigers they sooked and cried victim until they huffily had to accept the situation. I was bloody pissed off that I – as a person with absolutely no skin in the game – was making the effort to support them by voting and daily getting on the pages of The Oz to argue their case while some, who shall go nameless, were off in a poofy sulk threatening boycotts and claiming they were being treated as second-class citizens. If Martin Luther King Jnr had had that attitude the Jim Crow laws would still be in force.
Anyway, glad of the result. Happy it’s been done and granted a popular mandate. Now the politicians just need to do their jobs (for once) and get it legislated.
Instead of treating the actual question as being only about the rights of two people to succeed or fail in the institution of marriage, we’ve somehow allowed it to become so over-complicated by issues that have nothing to do with the question.
Why should a small minority of homophobic politicians be allowed to ‘select’ the ‘rules’ before gay marriage can be passed?
They ran a flagrant fear campaign depicting homosexuals as somehow ‘wrong’ on every level so why would the will of the people change their limited minds now they’ve got another shot at delaying it?
I’m hoping Turnbull finally locates a spine for this one.
Thank goodness common sense & inclusive love won so convincingly today. That raw emotion on the faces of everyone gathered across the country waiting for the result was excruciating here but their joy was infectious. ❤
Fine sentiments. Onya Bella. Although I have one gay friend who is more than a bit ambivalent about the outcome. His partner has always been insisting on a more robust demonstration of commitment.
I say “Man up or saddle up and head the border buddy.”
I reckon the Gay Bakers would be a great band name.
The Gay Bakers and Priscilla, Queen of the Dessert.
Lot of dough to be made in the gay wedding stampede.
Too right. And when you buy their 12 track album, you get 13 songs.
With Willisee ill, it seems an appropriate time to ask would there be a GST on the cake? Get better Mike. You too young to check out yet.
Ever danced the Gay Gordons? When I used to play country balls we used to laugh like buggery. They used to enjoy it though so we were all happy little campers!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4QyoSIQocKI
Just after Running Bear?
Good Lord. I say BASSMAN is it possible to die of excitement?
Reading some of the comments across the wall it would appear the sky is going to fall.
Razor says: November 14, 2017 at 8:20 pm Quote you source on the Libs keeping the policies? The SA Libs. announced “their” “energy” policy last month, it was in The Australian when questioned they admitted they are keeping what is in place and spending another $500 million subsidising domestic solar and adding further generation but NO details on the generation just promise of more. You really should keep up with the oxymorons in your own party, you may not know what they are doing but you will still support it to the hilt. No surprises.
Ho hum….
You asked for details, they were provided, you don’t like them so you dismiss them. No Surprises.
Saw a dog in a wedding dress on the way to work
On the way to work. You or the dog/
Why was the dog going to work in a wedding dress?
Pyne the poodle perhaps? It seems he was looking for love in the early hours this morning
My boss ( who happens to be gay) called me to his office this morning, looking seriously angry & asks me to sit down, then ‘deadpans’ that he just heard “Toyota want the right to refuse to sell cars to gay couples and Harvey Norman want the same rights for TV’s”. I just broke up…..
We can’t look at each other without laughing today. 🏹
Probably a sheep dog.
Terrible thing to say Trivalve. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder.
As for the postal survey itself, I do agree that it is more than rather shameful that so many from the QUILTBAG communities have been essentially put through both the wringer and the emotional roller-coaster to see whether the rest of the population might just be considerate enough to grant them a few more basic rights and their basic dignity just to try and appease a minority of religiously-inspired conservatives and reactionaries trying to throw a spanner under the misapprehension that the whole ‘Silent Majority’ canard was anything but convenient mythology in the works of Progress and keep the Liberal-National Party Coalition from imploding under the weight of its own unrepresentative egos once again – and by potentially the worst means possible (how’s that for a run-on sentence!). That shouldn’t absolve the ALP from its own trickiness at times.
Referenda/referendums and plebiscites aren’t the worst idea in a democracy, and maybe we could do with a few more to settle thorny issues that don’t involve the basic human rights and dignities of usually more vulnerable members of our populace. They’re best for other social and financial measures and constitutional reform, really, not this garbage. If we can keep big money and vested interests out of them, maybe Citizen-initiated ones are a reasonable step as well – as well as keeping governments from using such processes to try and turn momentary political advantage into a permanent one.
Lastly, I also wish someone would tell that IPA nitwit manchild, Sen. Patterson that social progress is not a zero-sum game and almost never has been that I can think of.
Well it would appear Rhys that it was actually the Labor heartland of Western Sydney that said NO. So your hypothesis about LNP unrepresentative ego’s is demonstrably wrong. Will your PC rant allow you to call out a religion or are conservative Christians only fair game in your view. You normally do better than that.
I say never let a chance go by.
Those who yelled and screamed to get the whole process going in the first place once it became obvious that it would probably even scrape through both houses of Parliament usually fit the bill of being Conservative Christians. That’s what I’m criticising, not necessarily that probably a substantial chunk of a few other minority religions likely voted No as well. For one, there aren’t any conservative Muslims or Hindutvas or Buddhists (or from all those other little religious groups that have settled in that middle-western and -southern ring of Sydney) in the Commonwealth Parliament that I’m aware of (the Liberal Right have really missed a trick there only really appealing to the Italian and Yugoslavs particularly, and trying to overcome their histories of saying nasty things about Asians and Middle Easterners).
That there’s been a positive outcome to something with such a cynical provenance doesn’t mean we should be writing encomia for the Prime Minister any time soon, for mine.
Hmmmm – off topic, looks like a coup is on the go in Zimbabwe. His sacking of the Vice President must have been the last straw
Actually looks more complicated than that. Not sure who is on what side. Seems army may have been ordered to get rid of supporters of the sacked VP. What a mess………….. yet again.
Would like to see the old bastard and his horror of a wife get what they deserve.
I doubt my cousin and her family will return, they started again in the UK and the kids have spent most of their lives there now.
They had a cabinet making business, employed twenty so not huge but it was jobs, suspect it didn’t last long after they were forced out.
The outcome will depend on the results of negotiations with the Chinese.
The replacement isn’t likely to be much better either JB if what I’ve read about the likely candidate is anything to go by.
You have it in one JB. Everyone laughed when Rudd wanted to put more aid into Africa as he did PNG and the Solomons etc. There was a very good reason for that. China owns Africa, PNG, Polynesia and some of Micronesia. Tonnes of the drug Ice now comes direct from factories, note I said factories, straight into Australia and NZ.
We think in electoral cycles. China thinks in dynasties……..
Jeepers Razor. That’s scary
True unfortunately Boa and I can back up every claim with evidence. Masses of money into PNG in particular……..
Spot on. JB. It would seem that China was the coup consultant. They have invested billions in Zimbabwe and probably felt they could do without Grace.
I’m wondering how much may have been paid into an offshore bank account to convince them to go quietly. I don’t think Grace comes cheap.!
I just hope James Patterson’s pro-discriminatory butcher, baker, and candlestick maker bill isn’t going to be some ambit claim to try and water down anti-discrimination laws slightly less as a compromise sop to the religious conservatives on both sides of the political aisle.
Why not govern this country by a plebiscite on every issue that this parliament cannot agree on.? Let the people govern – they’d do a better job.
That cunning plan has been tested.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Rise_and_Rise_of_Michael_Rimmer
BODHISATTVA…Citizen initiated referanda in the Nordic lands. I also like proportional representation.
How is it we can waste $122million on camp marriage but CANNOT have a bloody say in Howard taking us into a 15 year war . We will end up like the Greeks….warring FOREVER!
As to who voted against it, the spread of seats and the demographics tell the tale.
glaring wot?