Wentworth independent says report is ‘being concealed from the public using cabinet privilege as an excuse’ • Can Kerryn Phelps take Wentworth? – Australian politics live podcast

The high-profile independent hoping to create an upset in Malcolm Turnbull’s seat of Wentworth says Scott Morrison needs to release the Ruddock review on religious freedom before the byelection.

Kerryn Phelps told Guardian Australia’s politics podcast that Morrison needed to come clean about his intentions before the 20 October contest because “the report is being concealed from the public using cabinet privilege as an excuse”.

“I call on Scott Morrison to release the report before the Wentworth byelection and release his proposed legislation so people in Wentworth know what they are voting for when it comes to those so-called religious freedoms,” Phelps said.

Phelps, a medical doctor and civil rights activist, said she had made a submission to the Ruddock review, which was established as part of the process of legalising marriage equality. She declared it would be “an incredible act of doublespeak to call this religious freedom, when what this is really about is using religion as an excuse to water down anti-discrimination laws”.

“If somebody on the basis of religion can be given a licence to discriminate and say that’s on the basis of my religion, then we are headed very much down the path of a religious-based rather than a secular government”.

Ruddock handed his report to the then Turnbull government in late May, but it has remained under wraps. Morrison has indicated in a number of interviews he will be taking a proactive approach on protecting religious freedom, but the detail of the prime minister’s plan is not yet clear.

This week’s Guardian Essential poll suggests Australians are divided about whether Australia needs a new law protecting religious freedom, with 37% of the sample supportive, 26% opposing the idea and 37% undecided.

In a wide-ranging conversation as the byelection campaign in Wentworth moves into high gear, Phelps told the podcast she was running because it was time to get an independent voice in the Sydney seat the Liberals currently hold on a 17% margin.

She said people in Sydney’s eastern suburbs were upset with how Turnbull was treated by his colleagues, and many Liberal voters felt alienated from the party’s policy direction.

“They don’t like the actions of the hard right, there is anger against people like Tony Abbott and Peter Dutton and Eric Abetz and Mathias Cormann for the way they moved against Malcolm Turnbull and forced this byelection,” she said.

“They are really annoyed about this byelection. They are not happy with the policies of the Liberal party. They want to see some socially progressive policies but with economic responsibility”.

Hoping to ride a wave of voter disaffection to take the seat, Phelps stumbled in the early days of the campaign over the issue of preferences. At her campaign launch, Phelps urged voters to put the Liberal party last but has now backflipped on that position, and says she will preference the Liberals ahead of Labor.

She said she switched because of realpolitik: she now understood that putting the Liberals ahead of Labor was more likely to get her elected in the contest. Phelps was sanguine about being cast as a “stooge” by opponents, because thus far she had been cast as a Liberal, Labor and Greens stooge, and she was “no one’s stooge”.

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If she makes it to parliament, Phelps said, she would guarantee supply to the Morrison government, and confidence, unless there were “exceptional circumstances”. She gave no guarantee on supporting any particular piece of legislation, declaring “people are sick to death of people spouting a party line”.

She said she would “not lightly support a no confidence motion” against Morrison, because she believed governments, and prime ministers, should run a full term. “I think the role of the independent is not to make or break governments.”

But in the event circumstances warranted a shift in her position on confidence, Phelps said she would vote “according to conscience” and respect the wishes of the “overwhelming majority of Wentworth voters”.

She said climate change and the treatment of asylum seekers were already significant issues in the contest, and she predicted the lack of climate action would be a significant problem for the Liberals in the federal election because of the government’s “complete paralysis on this issue”.

Phelps said there needed to be a policy solution allowing for more investment in renewable energy “because that will bring prices down”.

She said she supported the position of the Australian Medical Association on offshore immigration detention, and an urgent solution was required to end the indefinite detention of children.

The AMA president last week urged Morrison to take urgent action to remove families and children from Nauru, preferably to the Australian mainland, to safeguard their physical and mental health. The president also asked Morrison to facilitate access to Nauru for a delegation of Australian doctors to assess the health and wellbeing of people in detention.

“The appalling treatment of asylum seekers is not acceptable,” Phelps said, but she said it was unlikely, given the attitude of Labor and the Coalition, that people would be brought to the Australian mainland.