It is now official: the marriage equality plebiscite is dead. Following a Labor vote to oppose it, the concept is now dead for the foreseeable future. This is being celebrated on the left. This celebration strikes me as politically myopic and cutting off the nose to spite the face. Let me explain
A brief recap: the conservatives who run the Liberal party (and hence the nation) never wanted marriage equality, so they created their own success by approaching this reform in a non-binding way: if the plebiscite passed, they would ignore it,and if the Greens and Labor should scuttle it, so much the better. So I realise that the conservatives are the bad guys here, I understand that. The plebiscite was derided as fostering hate and giving a voice to bigotry. A far more legitimate criticism, I wrote in a previous post, was the fact that we don’t vote for rights (or at least we shouldn’t).
Now we see the celebration of the death of the plebiscite. *sigh* – how was the fact that this was a huge *opportunity* for the left missed so blatantly? Think about it: marriage equality has widespread support (some 70%) in the country and would, in all likelihood, have passed with relative ease. If the conservatives ignore the result, as some said they would, so much the better: you take that and you break them with it! They ignored the will of the people. They are tyrants. They are fascists. They hate democracy. They hate the Australian people. You hammer and hammer and hammer on that to a landslide at the next election.
But no. The seeming unwillingness to call the bully’s bluff has resulted in the conservatives getting their way yet again, without even the prospect of political consequences. The utter lack of strategic vision, the limiting of the focus to the news cycle (not even the election cycle) has resulted in a major missed political opportunity for the left. Chances to throw the conservatives’ own hubris back in their faces and have it explode should be leapt at, not squandered by woefully misguided partisanship or the fear of hurting people’s feelings. This is the new civil rights movement: movements for rights often involve blood, sweat and, yes, the occasional tear or two.
Anything that is worth achieving is never easy, and if you had been able to see the forest instead of sitting on tree branches, you could have turned this to your political advantage quite easily. Instead, the hard rights gets its way with no political fallout and a major political opportunity has been squandered.
CA
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