We’ve spent the past week in politics thinking about same sex marriage, and the mechanics required to deliver or defeat that outcome, but this weekend, we need to pull our heads out of the nuts and bolts and consider some of the broader resonances.



We’ve learned a number of important things since MPs returned from their winter break.

In no particular order, we’ve learned that Tony Abbott has finally exhausted the patience of his parliamentary colleagues, apart from Eric Abetz and Kevin Andrews, and now feels he needs to raise an external army in order to keep himself on the chess board.

With the postal plebiscite in play, Abbott raced to position himself in his favourite and most successful political role – that of opposition leader.

Except this time, things are different.

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Abbott will not be leading a venerable institution, an establishment political party, but in his mind, creating a grass roots, surly-as-hell Trumpian movement, where he will use the marriage equality debate to style himself the leader of people alienated by progress and disconnected from mainstream politics.

Abbott’s current ambition is titular head of Pissed off and Proud.

In the present political climate, that is fertile territory, as Abbott well knows, and if you happen to succeed, potentially a means of broadening your factional power base beyond Kevin, Eric, Alan, Andrew, Ray and Peta.

It’s a chance to claw your way back.

Then we have Bill Shorten’s big moment. Shorten isn’t auditioning to be the head of screw the system, he’s auditioning to be prime minister.

Anyone watching this debate knows Australia is standing at an important historical juncture, where the country is having a proxy debate about who we are now, and who we want to be, and Shorten wants to position himself as a politician with the gravitas to carry that debate.

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While Shorten and the people around him are inclined to be pleased with themselves and their political smarts, they can still read opinion polls, which tell them the Labor leader isn’t loved by the public, there’s a hesitation factor he needs to overcome, and stumping around the country for a cause he very sincerely believes in presents an opportunity to grow.

Also presenting opportunity is young people, and the motivation the postal vote presents to get them on the electoral roll. Shorten made clear this week his objective wasn’t only to get them on the roll, voting yes for marriage equality – but for Labor to sign up and own a whole new generation.

While the political world is shifting around him, Malcolm Turnbull is presenting to the public as a politician with next to no room to move. He’s keeping busy busy, and rallying no one.

Assuming the postal ballot proceeds, and given his two main political opponents – Shorten and Abbott – have sprinted into position, implicitly elevating the imperative of leadership, Turnbull is going to have to decide who he’s dancing with, whether it’s the powerbrokers in his party who currently give him protection to lead the Liberal party, or whether he is demonstrably true to his own beliefs.

The Liberals risk losing a generation of young people to progressive parties by doggedly hugging the white picket fence.

It’s not only Turnbull with a decision to make.

The Liberal party really needs to wise up, and quickly, to the reality that this cause is much bigger than the specific rights of one particular minority group. It’s a generational marker.

Currently, one of Australia’s parties of government risks losing a generation of young people to progressive parties by doggedly hugging the white picket fence.

Plainly the Liberal party has to have a respectful eye to its conservative base, but it also needs a strategy of renewal for the future. It’s a big call, and a deeply stupid one, to write off potential new recruits on the basis your ageing cohort just can’t cope with modernity.

As well as the dilemmas presented by current events just running their course, in more or less linear fashion, there is also the big wildcard of whether the postal ballot is legal.

The high court will begin the process of mulling this on Friday.

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Even though marriage equality advocates have brought the legal challenge, the result of this decision isn’t actually do or die, because the momentum is with them.

If the postal ballot is found not to be constitutional, and the Liberal party manages not to implode and successfully hold up parliamentary resolution for the remainder of this term, marriage equality advocates can also read opinion polls.

The polls tell them Labor is currently favourite to win the next federal election, and Labor has promised to bring on a vote in 100 days.

But while campaigners for marriage equality can maintain their hope if they can maintain patience, the government’s position is rather different.

The high court striking down the postal vote would set off another explosion inside the Turnbull government.

Turnbull this week tried to fortify himself and the government against the possible explosion by saying if the high court knocks out the ballot, that’s it, the government will not facilitate a vote.

Fighting words, but that’s not really up to the prime minister. Colleagues can easily take that out of his hands.

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Warren Entsch has already publicly reserved his right to bring on the debate, and he speaks like a man who has run out of patience with the antics of colleagues who only want to obstruct and delay.

The remaining group of Liberal supporters of marriage equality then will face a terrible dilemma.

They are perfectly within their rights to bring on a parliamentary vote, given the plebiscite would been blocked twice, by the parliament and a second time by the high court.

But they are not dealing with rational actors who will applaud them for their good sense and initiative, and they know it. Dangerous doesn’t begin to describe the sequence a spot of floor crossing would trigger.

So if the court challenge succeeds, and the postal vote is stopped in its tracks, the Liberal MPs who want to shift the government to a post-plebiscite position will then have to make a decision that will affect not only the direction of the nation, but the immediate fate of the prime minister and the government.

Everyone in the government knows that.

So right now, at the end of a bruising parliamentary sitting week, the Liberal party is watching the high court and holding its breath.