WITHOUT a doubt, the biggest task facing the Turnbull government is to begin the unpopular task of budget repair, to stem the escalation in the national debt now growing at the mind-boggling rate of $1.4 billion a week.
Last week there were encouraging signs the Coalition and Labor might have reached sufficient agreement on key points to enable the government’s “omnibus bill” of budget repair measures to be carried into legislation.
Even so, it’s only a drop in the bucket of what is needed if future generations are not to inherit a “banana republic” economy that is so weighed down with the debts of the present generation’s profligacy as to be beyond salvage.
Malcolm Turnbull has no doubts about the scale of the challenge confronting his narrowly-elected government. As he recently told The Australian’s Paul Kelly: “The essential obligation of this parliament has got to be coming to terms with the economic reality of our situation, putting aside the blame game…”
Yet to read the tabloids or tune in to the wireless or television, you wouldn’t know we had a budgetary problem. The only problem you’d be aware of would be the future of the same-sex marriage plebiscite, which to the chattering classes is the great moral challenge of our time.
There’s debate over whether Labor, led by a cynical Bill Shorten, should support the plebiscite bill; there’s angst over how the plebiscite question should be worded; there’s confusion over how the parliament should act on the result.
Pressure is mounting on the government to abandon the plebiscite plan altogether (despite it having been a major plank of the Coalition’s election platform) and allow the issue to be decided by a conscience vote of parliamentarians.
Last week the Sydney Morning Herald published a comment piece from Dean Smith, a Liberal (gay) senator from Western Australia, in which he mounted the specious argument that the proposed plebiscite threatened the very basis of Australia’s representative parliamentary democracy.
As he sees it, we elect parliamentarians to “make decisions on the full gamut of issues that confront the nation”, and never had our founding fathers intended there be exemptions to this rule for issues of a controversial nature.
Well, I think he’s wrong. We elect parliamentarians to make decisions (including unpopular ones) on all matters affecting the running of the nation, but not to tell us how to order our private lives, or shape society. That’s more the job of our religious leaders, whose exhortations we can individually adopt or reject, as we choose.
Any change to the meaning of “marriage” is so fundamental, and so sweeping, that the decision must come from the people. If Turnbull backs down on the plebiscite, the Nats must walk away.