Polls no indicator for same-sex marriage attitudes
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Jim Wallace
Despite the grandstanding, the Greens' attempt to demonstrate that there is majority support for gay marriage in the suburbs and regional Australia has failed, in fact backfired.
But it wasn't for want of trying.
Their ally GetUp! - for all intents and purposes a subsidiary of the Greens - was panicked into action. It told its members that their contact with politicians showed MPs offices had received vastly more correspondence from those supporting marriage, speaking of the MPs as having been "inundated" with emails.
Not surprising really, as this is a definition which symbolises the strong desire of our community to promote an environment in which children can be conceived and grow to maturity in a stable home with the love and role model of both a mother and father. Even for those of us for whom this has not worked we acknowledge it as the ideal, and it is almost impossible to understand how when the Greens are swamping us with legislation to ensure the natural environment for every tree in Australia, they won't do the same for children. But consistency is hardly their strength.
GetUp!'s campaign certainly initially worried MPs with the volume of emails received. However at least one who went back to the originators of the emails for confirmation of their addresses, received no replies from nearly 50 per cent of them. Clearly they didn't, as they had claimed, live in the electorate and other MPs have said they had to discount hundreds of such false emails, one 700.
Other comments on some same-sex activists' social media sites recently have exposed the use of overseas networks to vote on polls, with Greg from Tallahassee saying he was glad to help out on a recent SMH one, and other helpful individuals describing how to manipulate various polls to "vote as many times as you want to".
Public polls have become so open to manipulation that they are virtually useless as an indicator of public opinion. The one that matters is the federal election where you can only vote once and Greg from Tallahassee won't be there.
Political parties need to look past these polls at a few facts.
Firstly in 18 of the 30 electorates on which MPs reported back as required by Adam Bandt, the feeling in the electorate was reported as overwhelmingly for retaining the definition of marriage; well over 90 per cent in a good number of them, with figures like 595 to 14 (Hinkler) and 1,015 to 65 (Deakin). Only six of the 30 reported their electorates in favour of gay marriage, and only three of those produced statistical proof from their consultation and not surprisingly they were from the inner-city seats of Wentworth, Moreton and Melbourne.
Secondly, the great majority of those who support marriage are not going to bother publicly proclaiming it when they are continually subjected to vicious language and abuse whenever they raise their heads. The charges of homophobe and bigot may have neutralised public debate until now, but they will not affect people in the privacy of the polling booth.
Finally, the reality is that applying even the most generous statistics for the homosexual community as numbering 3 per cent of the population and the absolute upper end of the take-up rate for gay marriage overseas, a maximum of just over half a per cent of the Australian population would take this up.
On the other side of the ledger at least half the population support retaining the definition of marriage anyway, but perhaps 15 per cent of them hold marriage so deeply for cultural or faith reasons that it is for them a vote-changer. They simply will not support a party which fails to protect the definition of marriage. They also don't want to see it weakly make marriage a conscience issue, as Labor is now considering, but to show that it stands for this foundational relationship as a matter of principle.
But surely numbers don't matter in an issue of discrimination you might say, and I'd agree.
However amendments to 85 pieces of legislation by the Rudd government removed any substantive discrimination against same-sex couples. This is not a matter of discrimination.
It is instead another Greens' ideological agenda, and perhaps it's time Labor stopped listening to manipulated polls and Greg from Tallahassee, and instead to the real electorate, which last week comprehensively rejected any change to the definition of marriage.
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