Speaking freely on crucial but controversial issues – like same-sex marriage – reduces the threat of MPs crossing the floor.
Next year, the Federal Parliament will probably vote on same-sex marriage using the conscience-vote method. Prime Minister Julia Gillard is recommending this approach to Labor’s national conference, while reiterating her personal opposition. Liberal leader Tony Abbott opposes this approach, but other Coalition figures such as Barnaby Joyce are open-minded.
Let’s be clear what this means. Conscience votes, votes free from party discipline, are essentially an act of strategy by leaders, not a recognition of the conscience of parliamentarians. They are, though, an important injection of humanity into the proceedings of Parliament. Over the past 50 years, there has been on average less than one a year in the Federal Parliament. During the Howard government, there were four major conscience votes. There has yet to be one during the Rudd-Gillard governments. Conscience votes also occur in state parliaments at about the same rate, perhaps even less frequently.
The votes have covered varied policies, but are often closely associated with the moral and ethical issues that have followed any departure from traditional Christian morality since the 1950s and ’60s. Same-sex marriage is typical. One of the earliest conscience votes in the ’50s concerned marriage and divorce law reform, but over several decades at both the state and Commonwealth level abortion law reform was the prime example of parliamentary legislation by conscience vote. During the Howard years, the votes concerned euthanasia, embryonic stem cell research, RU-486 and cloning.
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