Businesses should be allowed to discriminate against patrons “for any or no reason”, including the right to refuse to serve gay weddings, the Liberal senator Cory Bernardi has said.

Bernardi wrote a blog post on Wednesday about a Victorian printing house that reportedly refused to print an anti-same-sex marriage book by a conservative GP.

Labor has warned that the “freedom to refuse” – as Bernardi described it – suggests he wants federal discrimination law to be amended to allow businesses to refuse service on grounds including race, sex, and sexuality, which is prohibited.

Bernardi’s call also increases pressure on the attorney general, George Brandis, to include extensive exemptions to discrimination law in proposed amendments to the Marriage Act.

The book at the centre of the controversy is written by David van Gend, who is also the president of the Australian Marriage Forum, and is called Stealing From a Child: the Injustice of “Marriage Equality”.

McPherson’s Printing Group, which is owned by OpusGroup, told the conservative publisher Connor Court it would not be able to fulfil the order because it had been instructed by senior management not to print the book, Connor Court said.

Bernardi said van Gend had responded by saying the company was “within their right as a private company to discriminate against people like me on ideological grounds”. He said van Gend was right to do so.

Bernardi criticised “social justice warriors” for their use of anti-discrimination law, including a case against the Catholic church in Tasmania for an anti-marriage equality pamphlet that has been discontinued.

“We have seen bakers fined in America for refusing to support homosexual weddings and we have seen a Christian baker in South Australia targeted for protests merely for saying they don’t support redefining marriage,” he said.

By contrast, when TV networks refused to carry ads in favour of “traditional marriage” there was a completely different response, he said.

“And this is the essence of the dilemma we now face: is it OK for any business to say they simply don’t want your business for any or no reason?” he said. “Personally I think it is, but that freedom has to be defended and protected so that it applies to any business, no matter what side of a debate they are on.”

On 14 September Guardian Australia reported that a Liberal party room briefing revealed the government would propose new protections for “conscientious objectors” to same-sex marriage which marriage equality advocates feared could allow civil celebrants, registrars and even bakers and florists to refuse to provide services for same-sex weddings.

The report of a protection for “conscientious objectors” was confirmed by the shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, and Labor’s equality spokeswoman, Terri Butler, at a meeting with Brandis on Monday.

Brandis has not ruled out exemptions to discrimination law, nor said how extensive they would be.

Dreyfus told Guardian Australia: “Senator Bernardi’s shocking comments today should make us truly fearful about how far those changes will go.

“We know that the hard right wing of the Liberal party is dictating the terms of the marriage equality plebiscite. How do we know they won’t give in to senator Bernardi’s demands to rip up anti-discrimination law as well?”

Dreyfus questioned whether Bernardi’s comments meant “he thinks pubs should be able to refuse the business of Indigenous Australians too?”

“Or that wedding venues should be able to turn away interracial couples?

“It’s ludicrous. We must not let extreme views like this have anything to do with marriage equality.”

Van Gend, who is on a national book tour, has said on his blog that, if legalised, same-sex marriage would produce another stolen generation.

“I can understand the gay lobby being worried about a book that so clearly exposes the harms of genderless marriage and of the whole genderless package deal that comes with it but they should not try to shut down our side of the debate by banning a book,” Van Gend said in a statement.

The chief executive of OpusGroup, Richard Celarc, was unavailable for comment.



A spokeswoman for Connor Court told Guardian Australia it was the first book in 12 years that a printer had refused to print and the company had no idea why it was singled out for censorship.

Connor Court has also published Ian Plimer’s Heaven and Earth, and Bernardi’s The Conservative Revolution.