The outcome of the National Press Club same sex marriage debate was so obvious it's easy to despair that such a showdown was deemed necessary. But it delivered as entertainment value. Neil McMahon writes.

What a busy week for the feral, frightened right. Uppity blacks to kick in the morning - back in your box, Adam Goodes - and uppity gays to smack around in the afternoon. So many culture wars, so little time. It's hard for a conservative warrior to know where to look.

But on Wednesday afternoon, all eyes turned to the National Press Club, where Cory Bernardi, patron saint of The Way Things Used To Be, was in debate with Senator Penny Wong. Powerful, whip-smart, confident, Asian, a leftie, gay and a mother, Wong is such a potent collection of things that keep Cory and his cohort awake at night that she might as well have turned up carrying the hand basket in which the country is swiftly going to hell. But this is not Wong's style. She worked on Bernardi by stealth, armed with the sneaky weapons those people are likely to pull on you at any moment - logic, reason, facts, good manners. You've got to watch them. My great aunt sat next to one of them on the bus last week. Crafty buggers.

The subject: marriage equality. The viewpoints: very well known. So well known. Too well known. Indeed, this debate has been going on for so long, its positions so well staked-out and the inevitable (if not immediate) outcome so obvious that it's easy to despair that such a showdown was deemed worthy for a debate on this stage. But this is Australia, a country now so backward on the issue we're in danger of becoming like that Japanese soldier found hiding on an island decades after World War II, unaware the conflict was over and that Japan had colonised the world with Tamagotchis.

Cory Bernardi holds similar fears about gay people: give them this and they will then take that and then force their lifestyle gizmos on the rest of the country. This may or may not include opening Tinder accounts for their livestock and domestic pets, the "slippery slope" to bestiality being chief among Bernardi's famous contributions on the subject - something he semi-denied today. "I never said it would lead to that," he declared, prompting both Wong and the Twitterverse to hit him over the head with evidence to the contrary.

But one senses you could belt Bernardi with a piece of four-by-two all day long and he wouldn't feel a thing. A cross between Dan Quayle, Fred Nile and Sir Joh Bjelke-Petersen, he brings to bear a bland handsomeness, a certain charm, a head full of misfiring neurons and the air of a man disappointed in the world ever since he got too old for Sunday school. His mission in life is to take that disappointment out on the rest of us and he will not be deterred.

While Penny Wong ended Wednesday's debate channelling Gough Whitlam - "It's time, friends, to make the change" - Cory was displaying typical dexterity in rolling relentlessly forward while also tying himself in knots, forgetting the wise words of his Bible-bashing political ancestor Sir Joh: "You can't sit on a fence, a barbed wire fence at that, and have one ear to the ground."

But Bernardi had his britches firmly attached to one at the press club. He was, for example, all in favour of free votes for MPs - "Every vote is a free vote in the Liberal Party," he brightly told Wong, making it sound like a swinger's club - but he was against a free vote in parliament on this issue. There are limits, apparently.

He also compared same-sex marriage to the carbon tax and the republic - both were declared inevitable, and look what happened. And besides, he said, you didn't have to do something just because it was popular. (Beating up on asylum seekers is a notable exception to this principle.)

In all, this debate was useful only as entertainment value - if you wanted to watch Wong's inevitable schooling of her fellow senator, you got what you wanted. She was her usual graceful, gently-spoken self, delivering perhaps her most eloquent answer to a random extraneous question about the Adam Goodes racism controversy. Wong lamented the impact of "prejudice according to an attribute". She wasn't talking about marriage equality, but she could just as well have been.

Both the Goodes affair and the gay marriage debate often throw up accusations from Bernardi and his tribe of "victimhood" - their message being: get over yourselves. But as this debate again showed, when it comes to playing victim you can't beat a wounded conservative like Bernardi lashing out at the injustices visited on them by the modern world.

Why, the "vocal minority" and their "propaganda campaign" were on the rampage, he warned - forcing their views on others and trying to silence his voice. This argument might have some chance of ringing true if not coming from a senator appearing in a debate televised on three television stations to a national audience - but as always with Bernardi, it's best not to think too hard about things.

It gets tough up there on the barbed wire fence. Come down soon, Cory, before you end up engaged to a passing horse.

Neil McMahon is a freelance writer.