Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I do not intend to take my entire time. The government is happy to put its position why we will not support it and then get on with the vote. The Labor Party's position about a free vote today but no free vote in three years is so ridiculous that they actually lost a senator over it. Joe Bullock resigned last night as a senator for Western Australia because he sees the flaw in the Labor Party's position. They have lost a senator from Western Australia because of this harebrained scheme they came up with at the ALP conference.

On this side of the House we will give everyone in Australia a free vote. Your vote will be the same as my vote, Deputy Speaker Scott. You will be back in civilian life, as we say in the parliament for those who have been here a while, and your vote will be worth the same as my vote, assuming the good burghers of Sturt re-elect me at the coming election. Everybody in the gallery will have the same vote as everybody on the floor of the House. That is a genuine request asking the Australian people what they think. That is a good policy because this is a difficult issue for the Australian public.

This is a significant societal change. I support that change. One of the reasons I support that change is my experience as a member of parliament. I have seen the impact of same-sex households not having legal rights and, because of that lack of legal rights, not being able to support the children that they have been fostering or adopting. I think it is time to give those same-sex households the same stability, the same rights as those in opposite-sex households. So I do support a yes vote in the plebiscite, and that is how I will campaign, assuming I am re-elected, after the election. But there are people in my electorate who strongly disagree with me, and I want to give them the chance to have a vote and make a decision. If the Australian public's view is that there will be no change to the Marriage Act then that is the decision of the Australian public, and it is right and proper that they should be able to make that decision.

So we will not be supporting the suspension of standing orders. We do not want to play politics with this issue. There is a fundamental flaw in the Labor Party's position, which is that they demand a free vote today but they deny a free vote in three years time. I believe and the government believes that we have the right policy, which is to ask the Australian people what their view is and give them the opportunity to indicate to us where they want us to go in the plebiscite.

I should deal with one last-minute issue. The member for Griffith said some members of my party and the National Party have said that they will not follow the views of the plebiscite. They are allowed to say that. This is a democracy; it is not a Stalinist state. The point is that it is obviously beyond the wit of the Labor Party to work out how to get around that issue. But it is not beyond my wit. The easiest thing to do is to pass a bill through this parliament establishing the plebiscite and the last act before royal assent as the question of the plebiscite and whether it says yes or no to that bill. The bill will never come back to the House of Representatives for people to vote against the will of the people. It can easily be in the act of parliament that the plebiscite is the last part of the process and then, once it is passed—if it is passed—it goes directly to the Governor-General for royal assent. It is not beyond the wit of this parliament to make the plebiscite—the will of the people—the final act that determines whether the law changes. The fact that the Labor Party cannot work that out is kind of indicative of many of the flaws and weaknesses in the Labor Party's gene pool, which is why they are not fit for government.

The government will certainly be voting against the suspension of standing orders and resuming normal programming because we have a significant agenda to work through while the Labor Party continues with these pathetic political stunts.

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