Faintly Bemused

It has now been over a week since the Federal Parliament passed legislation to allow marriage equality. I have watched local papers for the tedious flow of letters that might have followed.
But curiously there have been none.
What! The skies have not fallen in.
In fact, it all seems to be a bit ho-hum.
Exactly what we all predicted.
We have spent over a  100 million pursuing a questionnaire no one wanted, which  exaggerated popular fears and which told us what we all already knew.

I am personally glad, as a priest-religious celebrant that we have taken this step.
I doubt,  that I as a priest of the Anglican Church, under the rules of our organisation will live to see a marriage between two men or two women, or  intersex men and/or women in one of our 'hallowed precincts'. While I am sad about that I do get it.
And, as I choose to remain an Anglican, I endure that sadness.
Sorry because I think we can do better, as our Scottish, New Zealand, American & Canadian sisters and brothers have done and will do.

Meanwhile I am 'bemused' and totally GLAD that Australia has so embraced Marriage Equality that it is a non-issue

Marriage Equality---opportunity to act SUPPORT NOW

I have taken up the invitation to write to Parliamentarians in anticipation of next-week's resumption of sittings in Canberra about Marriage Equality.
In particular you could do likewise by following Australian Marriage Equality's link.

I chose to write to C Pyne, as a prominent SA Liberal politician ( or another similar) along the following lines

Dear Mr Pyne

You are more than well-aware  that the nation is paying close attention to the discussion in your Party room next week about Marriage Equality.

I happen to be a priest of the Anglican Church, and along with a number of my colleagues am steadfastly in favour of Marriage Equality. Many Christians are in favour of this move

I also recognise, sadly, that it is unlikely that internal processes within a number of Christian Church's themselves will allow this to happen within Church ranks.

Yet this does not mean, I suggest, that our Nation as a whole should not go forward .

It seems unlikely to me that, as a priest, the Anglican Church will allow me to pray for God's blessing on the marriage of same-sex partners who clearly wish to make a lifelong marriage commitment to each other and their children. This is to the Church's shame.

I am sorry that, as a Commonwealth,  we have got stuck, largely because the plebiscite as a process  is clearly not going to work!  

This is so atrociously political on all sides as to be offensive.

I think it is incumbent upon the party of Government to move to break this impasse and exercise leadership.

The community is more than tired of the petty-politicking and I urge you and your colleagues to move definitely to resolve this.

[I think the 'Dutton Postal Vote' option is just a bizarre distraction, and cynical in the extreme.  Non-compulsory, non-binding. In other word 'non helpful' & 'non useful']

All the best and 

Respectfully,

Stephan Clark

Parish Priest: St Mary Magdalene's  

Anglican Church, Adelaide.

You might like to write to Pyne (above), or Birmingham or similar .
Birmingham seems to have become such a 'creature of the machine' which is deeply sad as he is creative thinker and should do better

The mistake of the mandate

In the days when I was much younger and ( perhaps) more naive, a University lecturer reminded me that the Westminster system is not about mandates.
"We elect people to govern, not to implement a narrow raft of policies" he would say ( or words to that effect ).
He was not saying, I suggest, that politicians should be  allowed to make a swathe of promises and then not be held to account; but rather that we, the electorate, should pay attention to the tenor of the discussion rather than the minutiae.
We are not electing people to implement piddling little policies. that would be far too small,  but to govern according to clearly articulated principles.  This is of course easier said than done.
We, the electorate,  by and large have allowed ourselves to be seduced by minutiae...make my tax go down, stop the boats, free beer for all...
Rather than demanding that our politicians GOVERN according to PRINCIPLE.

The reason why the narrow mandate is a mistake, is that we actually discover there is not one but  a number of mandates (plural)....[housing, infrastructure, security, States' rights, increased wealth, closed borders, care for refugees, better education, military expenditure, lower taxes, improved health care, indigenous rights, marriage equality, law and order, water quality, a republic, farmers' rights, housing costs...... you get the idea...and I could go on]

Thinking back to the last election ( which was close... almost too close) all of these things and more were aired.

The electorate votes, I would say, not for one of these issues . But for the Team it believed most closely approximated most of their views in principle.
Some would hold that border control and lower taxes were what they held to be important. Others that water quality and military expenditure, law and order and marriage equality were what suited them.
We could go on and realise that some of us want part of this agenda and others want a different part.

This is NOT a mandate, this is an accomodation to a way of thinking.

So it is not appropriate or accurate to say that if I happen to have been elected, then everyone agrees with everything I said.
It is not even accurate to say that all those who voted for me ( and in this case it was barely 50%) were agreeing about the things that I was proposing.

There was no mandate for anything.
There was rather permission to govern.
Do not use the Mandate Argument to say...I cannot do this. Rather take the cudgels and govern.
Nothing would seem to be black and white, it is rather an invitation to enter into the mêlée of proper discussion.
Not applying the arbitrary mandates, but rather the principles that engender good government.

I fear that the "mandate argument" is the excuse of the craven to not declare themselves.

I do not believe that this wafer-thin government had a mandate for a plebiscite. If anything the reaction of the Houses shows that they clearly don't.

Get on and govern! You do not have a mandate for a plebiscite. And possibly not for much else either!
Get on and govern ...and realise the art of the possible......which after all according to many luminaries (Including J W Howard) is what politics is all about.