Immigration Minister Peter Dutton has criticised companies agitating for the government to take action on marriage equality. Credit:Brook Mitchell But on Wednesday, Fairfax Media's Matthew Knott broke the yarn: Dutton has himself cast on with a purler of a plan to resolve the gay marriage issue for this Fair Isle. (End terrible knitting puns. Proceed with confidence.) It emerged that Dutton is proposing a voluntary postal ballot on the matter of same-sex marriage, which would simultaneously fulfil the Coalition's election promise to put the matter to the people, obviate the need for parliamentary approval for the poll, and give Australia Post some much-needed additional letter business, a valuable fillip given that agency's champagne taste in CEOs. What? Peter Dutton working to smooth the way for gay marriage? To the untrained eye, this "Dutton Dressed As Glam" development is the most aberrant yet in a storyline already beset by a bamboozling series of multipartisan plot twists, including but not limited to:

Qantas boss Alan Joyce. Credit:Louise Kennerley 1) Tony Abbott signing up to a plebiscite proposal as PM, even though he hated the idea. 2) Malcolm Turnbull maintaining it even though he hated it even more than Abbott did. 3) Bill Shorten first endorsing a plebiscite, then voting to kill it. 4) The Parliament, the elected decision-making body of this nation, collectively refusing to make a decision on a matter which seems rather firmly to be within its professional purview, and

5) Pro-marriage equality activists, having complained for years that Australia was ignoring the issue, suddenly getting all shirty about the idea of the entire country clearing a Saturday to deal with it. But there is method to Dutton's madness. First, a postal plebiscite has a better chance of failing. Second, even if it didn't, there is a conservative view that if marriage equality is to become a thing, it would better suit the Coalition if it happened on their watch, thus allowing them to set some conditions. Like ensuring churches have the right to refuse to marry Adam and Steve. Or legislating to indemnify businesses and service providers who refuse to cater to same-sex weddings.

(Such protections, it is expected, will be warmly welcomed by the stubborn core of homophobes to be found in the floristry, sugarwork, hairdressing, hospitality, flight attendant and male haberdashery sectors.) Really, nothing about this debate should surprise anyone any more. Not the bizarre contortions to which the Parliament will go to avoid expressing an opinion on the matter, nor the elaborate individual reversals performed by its elected members. And certainly not the increasingly weird stuff that heterosexuals are happy to do to the institution of marriage at the exact same time as telling the queers that it's too special a tradition for them to have a go. I mean: What is the most-watched programme on Australian television at the moment?

Married At First Sight. Which tells you that while Australia as a federation is at this stage not yet ready to allow two women or two men who love each other deeply to get married, we are absolutely relaxed about a man and a woman who have never even met getting hitched for the purposes of KFC brand placement. And while the argument is periodically raised that once you extend marriage to human beings of the same sex you're cheapening the institution, or paving the way to polygamy, or embarking on a slippery slope that ends in humans marrying dogs or stoats or buckets of cheese, it's worth quietly recalling that The Bachelor already performs several of those functions in primetime. Farmer Wants A Wife is mainstream. Lesbian Wants A Wife? Not so much, though its premise is – oddly – far less offensive to the traditional institution we're officially so keen to protect. Loading

Marriage is like a luxury car. If you're straight, you're welcome to jump in half-cut, pull a few doughnuts, fill it with improperly restrained minors and wrap it round a tree. If you're gay, it's too precious for you to drive. Annabel Crabb is an ABC writer and broadcaster. Twitter: annabelcrabb