In the last fortnight there has been a rapid and unexpected surge of progress on gay equality within Australian Labor. The minister for sport and rightwing Labor powerbroker, Senator Mark Arbib, has called on the party to support gay marriage with the stirring words, ‘if I was the parent of a gay son or daughter I don’t know how I could tell them they didn’t have the same rights as I do.’ He has been joined by leftwing Queensland premier and ALP national president Anna Bligh, Tasmanian premier David Bartlett, Australian Workers’ Union national secretary Paul Howes. This follows leftwing supremo Senator Doug Cameron’s statement to a gathering of the party’s National Left faction in Canberra that the party must claim back progressive voters who deserted us at the last election, by championing policies such as gay marriage. Taken together, this represents a collection of the party’s most formidable elite.

Gay marriage has always been a policy supported, in an organisational sense, by the left group within the party. The intervention of such powerful members of the party’s right has been unexpected. Though they risk a schism with the socially conservative wing of their faction, they seem committed to their position. These are not loose cannons, they are deeply embedded operators in the Labor machine and since toppling Kevin Rudd, their power is very much in the ascendancy. So the question is, why? Or, to the less generous of spirit, what are they up to this time?

Let’s quickly restate the obvious principle of the matter, to which I believe they are genuinely committed (Paul Howes especially has a long record of speaking from his conscience on difficult issues of policy such as Australia’s treatment of asylum seekers). A ban on gay marriage is antithetical to the principles of a Labour party. It entrenches discrimination and affirms existing community prejudice as a pragmatic governing position.

However, in terms of the timing of this, must be the cold calculation that a ban on gay marriage no longer makes political sense. The electoral maths that underpin it no longer add up and the Australian Labor right have realised this.

If the political battlefield requires a parliamentary caucus, for matters of survival, to take a position opposed to party principle they need a survival strategy. In Australia the strategy of Labor in opposition was to appease the rightwing of the electorate by repeatedly stating opposition to marriage equality, while appeasing the left by assuring them that they would amend every single other act to remove any discrimination against same-sex couples. In government, Labor honoured their pledge. It came to 108 pieces of legislation, which were reformed with a single omnibus bill.

The problem was that during the last election the gay community were left wondering, if you can reform 108 pieces, why not 109? And in an unprecedented move they opted to vote for the Australian Greens, costing Labor a lower house seat, threatening several others and delivering balance of power to the Greens in the Senate. In this endeavour the Greens were supported by a massive chunk of voters who consider themselves progressive and who usually vote Labor. Unfortunately for Labor and in anger at the party’s general unwillingness to be rightwing, the moral right of the electorate unsurprisingly continued their two century long tradition of not voting Labor.

I’m not suggesting that this mass exodus of voters was driven by gay marriage alone. If the ban on gay marriage didn’t really offend our voters, federal Labor was also able to offer up a whole raft of socially reactionary policies that Green campaigners were delighted to tell you about. It’s all well and good to pursue outer suburban swing voters, but if Labor loses its lock on inner city seats permanently, it is very very hard to see how it will build a governing majority. Arbib and Howes realise this and seem to be working hard to avoid us stepping up for another thrashing in the inner city seats.

The thing that makes the gay marriage ban the ugliest kid in the room is that it is perfectly symbolic of a set of policies that have caused Australian Labor serious electoral harm. The only conceivable rhetorical defence of it is that it upholds tradition, an argument that seems to carry increasingly little credence with middle Australia and our core voters as it is totally rubbish. This difficulty is further compounded by the fact that no one seems to believe that we believe it when we say it.

So in order to continue with the policy as is, Labor has to continue to sound like it’s running for office in 1952 and haemorrhage progressive voters. Or Australian Labor could put itself out of its misery, be honest about what we really believe and start putting our winning coalition of voters back together. That’s not a left or right thing it’s just well played politics. Just ask the hardest heads in the room, comrades Arbib and Howes.

Photo: David Jackmanson