Senator Penny Wong
Here is my latest article for the British magazine The Salisbury Review (Autumn, 2018 edition):
Only a
decade ago, on the eve of the Federal election which saw Kevin Rudd’s
Australian Labor Party unseat John Howard’s conservative-leaning government,
none other than Penny Wong was making the anti-gay
marriage case: ‘On the issue of marriage I think the reality is there is a
cultural, religious, historical view around that which we have to respect. The
party’s position is very clear that this is an institution that is between a
man and a woman. I am part of a party and I support the party’s policies.’ Senator
Wong could be accused of dishonesty because immediately after Labor’s election victory,
which involved appealing – in part – to voters with an anti-gay marriage view
because of ‘a cultural, religious, historical view’. We might also add
hypocrisy. Before the 2013 Federal Election, when the issue of same-sex
marriage had become less of a liability, Wong attacked the then-Opposition
Leader for expressing the same opinion she was articulating only six years
before. In response to Tony Abbott’s avowal that he believed in ‘evolutionary
change’ and did not want to be stampeded into a ‘radical change based on the
fashion of the moment’, she made the following sharp riposte: ‘Note to Mr
Abbott: Equality is not a fashion item.’
In
fairness to Senator Wong, nevertheless, we should make several points. Firstly,
no doubt her personal opinion, before
the 2007, was pro-gay marriage. The Labor Party, as she pointed out at the
time, had an official policy on the matter, arrived at through due process, and
as member of that party she had no alternative but to accede to the collectivist
will. This all might sound a little Orwellian to a libertarian-conservative but
that has been the Labor’s modus operandi since
it began as a meeting of striking pastoral workers in the 1890s and was adopted
by manual workers throughout the land as the political wing of the union movement.
Senator Wong could rightfully argue that, over the years, should fought and won
the battle inside the party to make
its policy pro-gay marriage.
Julia
Gillard, the first female prime minister of Australia, from 2010-13, proved
even more cunning than Penny Wong. Throughout her time as prime minister
Gillard remained an opponent of same-sex marriage. Cynics insisted she adopted
this position only to keep working-class and orthodox Christians on side. The
cynics were not cynical enough. In her autobiography, My Story (2014), Gillard disclosed that she had opposed amending
the Marriage Act during her tenure in the top job not because of any deference to
conservative sensibilities in Australia, but because she was “too radical” to
support gay marriage. Que? As a young
student in the 1970s, or so her self-exculpatory explanation goes, ‘Red Julia’
decided that the institution of marriage itself was a patriarchal (that is, bourgeois) institution, ‘redolent of the
yesteryear stereotypes of women’, and so gay marriage – marriage of any kind –
could never be a part of the progressives’ emancipatory project. Once out
office, though, and her fortunes no longer dependent on traditionalist/working
class voters, dropped the whole I’m-too-radical-for-gay-marriage routine in a
heartbeat. From then on, unsurprisingly, she joined the rising chorus of same-sex
advocates.
The more
profound question, perhaps, is not the hypocrisy of ALP politicians – and, in
the end, a surprising number of their ‘conservative’ Coalition counterparts –
joining the same-sex marriage bandwagon, but how the bandwagon obtained an unstoppable
momentum in so few years of time. In the very broadest terms, at least, the
answer has to do with the unacknowledged Utopianism that propels the modern-day
Left, in not only Australia but throughout the West. Progressives, as Roger
Scruton argues in The Uses of Pessimism:
And the Danger of False Hope, are driven by “emergency-fuelled goals” that
are almost religious in the promise to deliver us from evil with redemptive
reforms. No sooner had the same-sex marriage vote been won than leading Labor
lights were calling for the abandonment of Australia Day on January 26 in
favour of a new national day of celebration, a date on the calendar more
amenable – and “healing” – for Indigenous activists. If only the government
would pass laws making a Muslim prayer room in every school, university and
public institution compulsory, if only transgender toilets became mandatory and
so on ad infinitum, we might
legislate our way to Shangri-La.
The
underlying tenet of our nascent people’s community is equality; not, we might
add, the Marxian dictatorship of the proletariat, but the similarly
authoritarian dictatorship of bohemia. The traditional strictures of
Christianity (including, obviously, traditional marriage) are out, replaced by
the unorthodoxies of fashionable universalism (except when they bump up against
the hard edges of Sharia law). Progressivism or, as Scruton calls it, ‘enforced
optimism’ is now the ascendant ideology in Australia and so the moment the
‘Yes’ promoters reconfigured their gay marriage campaign as ‘marriage equality’
the campaign was half won. And when Labor politicians and the Mainstream Media
began warning that a ‘No’ result would mean young homosexuals committing
suicide the die really was cast. Simply put, to vote ‘Yes’ was to be
open-minded and tolerant.
Being
open-minded and tolerant, nevertheless, has its limits. You cannot, apparently,
be open-minded and tolerant with people who are – well – not open-minded and tolerant.
For much of the campaign it was generally assumed, at least in polite society,
that a ‘Yes’ vote was a fait accompli.
But then, if only for the briefest of moments towards the end, a number of
commentators worried the polls might have it wrong, as had been the case with Brexit.
In the same way that a percentage of Brexiteers kept their voting intention to
themselves for fear of being labelled racist, maybe a segment of the Australian
population was playing its cards close to the chest; in this case, unlike the
British referendum, out of an aversion to the charge of homophobia. As it
happened, the ‘Yes’ vote held up, especially if the large informal vote is
discounted as any kind of protest.
Nonetheless,
the ‘No’ contingent had every reason to believe that their vote in favour of traditional
marriage would be attacked as sacrilege, a modern-day heresy no less. Peter
Goers, a self-identified homosexual who broadcasts for the Australian
Broadcasting Corporation (ABC), came out all guns blazing when the ‘Yes’ crusade
experienced a fleeting dip in support. Those on the wrong side of the same-sex
debate, asserted Goers, were ipso facto
homophobic: ‘Two people of the same sex who love each other and want to get
married must be hated.’ Goers cited only one supporter of the ‘No’ vote to
prove his case that every traditionalist or orthodox Christian is guilty of profanation:
‘Family Voice (formerly the Festival of Light) has championed the view of
former American gay porn actor and now celibate Christian Joseph Sciambra. In
his book, Swallowed by Satan, he
writes that “Satan is born out of the anuses of homosexual men”. Really? Well,
now we know.
What
happened to Penny Wong’s contention, enunciated only ten short years before? On the issue of marriage I think the reality
is there is a cultural, religious, historical view that which we have to
respect. The problem is not, as I outlined above, Senator Wong changing her
mind immediately after winning the 2007. In other words, the worry is not that
she has moved on from her previous opinion – for reasons of expediency or
otherwise, it matters not – but that her preceding belief is now verboten. The cultural, the religious
and the historical points of view
have not been defeated so much as exorcised from civilised discourse.
