Funnily enough Olag even though he oversaw the same sex marriage vote it was actually the doing of the super conservative Catholic Tony Abott whose sister is a Lesbian. I don’t know what he was thinking at the time when the left had refused to do anything about it in their time in power. Maybe he genuinely thought the no vote would win when push came to shove (excuse any possible mental imagery).
Abbott’s thinking was that it was going to happen anyway, the next time we had a Labor government, so he’d rather have it happen by a decision of the Australian people as a whole, than something simply imposed on them by a socialist government. He knew the way the vote would go - and he was enough of a true democrat to respect the will of the people if that is what happened.
The Liberal Party has always been the party of democracy in Australia - of the right of the people as a whole to have their say. Labor is the party that believes in the imposition of their agenda on the people ‘for their own good’ whether they agree with it or not.
The Liberal Party hasn’t always lived up to this. But it has done so fairly consistently.
A major decision at the core of society should only be taken by the express will of the people. Our system allows that will to be expressed in one of two ways - by a party seeking a mandate at an election, or by a separate vote.
Would anybody have really wanted an election where this was the major issue? Leaving aside the electoral mathematics, this is not an issue that should define who is in government for the next three years.
You mean “super-conservative Catholic” just like Pope Francis is.
And was Turnbull’s thinking like David Cameron’s? I can only go by his words with respect to Indonesia now.