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  The group agreed that Evans should speak up in public. The media focus on Smith and Entsch meant a new voice would get more attention, and Evans was an economic dry from Queensland rather than a moderate from the southern states, a group with an innate ability to antagonise Abbott. Evans went public on 31 July about his belief that a conscience vote was the way ahead. He made no threat to cross the floor but did not rule it out, leaving enough ambiguity for everyone to see this as a hint of his intentions.4

  No politician ever prospered from being half-hearted in pursuit of a cause. Evans did more than ten interviews over the next 48 hours and did not stop when Turnbull phoned to ask what he was doing. ‘What is your motivation?’ asked Turnbull. ‘Where is this going?’ The Prime Minister suggested Evans stop doing media interviews. The party whip, Nola Marino, called him with the same request on the grounds that the argument only intensified the division within the government. Evans did not fight the suggestions on the phone, but he kept to the plan. He did not tell Turnbull he was arranging, as they spoke, to appear on the ABC’s Lateline program that night. There would be no halt to the media campaign.

  The president of the Liberal National Party in Queensland, Gary Spence, was incensed. He sent an email to all party members to warn them against showing any support for Evans or his allies. Spence complained that members elected under the LNP banner had chosen to take a position that ‘defied’ party policy and the wishes of the membership.5 He said the party should not be ‘distracted’ on a ‘peripheral’ issue like same sex marriage. It was a common refrain from those who fought for traditional marriage: they claimed the argument was always a secondary concern, right until the moment came when it consumed them to the point of splitting the government. Their refusal to countenance change, and their determination to stop others, looked less like a distraction and more like an obsession.

  It was Wilson’s turn next. He walked into the Sky News studio to amplify the message that Parliament should settle the matter swiftly for the good of the community. He argued it was personal, too, in a way that reminded everyone of the human dimension behind the letter of the law. ‘I also have a personal conflict which torments, frankly, and challenges me on a daily basis, and I’d like to see this issue resolved,’ he said.6 Wilson had been the Abbott government’s choice for ‘freedom commissioner’ at the Australian Human Rights Commission in 2014. He was a good advocate to remind Liberal supporters that a party founded on personal freedom should also stand for marriage equality.

  The five members of the bloc were all out in the open. All had left a strategic doubt over whether they would cross the floor. Now the conservatives responded in the way they knew best. One day after Evans had declared his position in The Australian, unnamed ‘senior conservative Liberals’ told the Daily Telegraph that Turnbull’s leadership would be ‘terminal’ if he allowed a free vote.7 ‘If Turnbull can’t control the moderates, what’s the point of his prime ministership?’ asked one. A second said: ‘Effectively it says to our base, “we just don’t care about you”.’ The conservatives already had a ticket in mind: Dutton as leader with Greg Hunt as deputy.

  The party room seemed addicted to leadership spills. Whenever a difficult issue came up, aggrieved and anonymous Liberals would turn it into a leadership test. Every decision gave the bitter politicians of the party room, those consumed by personal ambition and grudges against their enemies, a chance to destabilise their government in pursuit of their own rewards. It was a chronic malady.

  Turnbull had to tread carefully. He supported marriage equality but thought the agitators would fail because they could not convince enough of their Liberal colleagues to overturn the plebiscite and hold a free vote. What if he put his authority on the line and made a change in policy by edict? It would be like taking a swing at Abbott: before too long all the furniture would be broken and the house burned down. Yet the matter had to be decided at a party room meeting now the five rebels had made their position known. Turnbull was campaigning in Western Australia when he decided to call every Liberal MP back to Canberra on Monday, 7 August, one day ahead of schedule, so they could settle marriage once and for all.

  Smith phoned Turnbull on the Monday morning to see if the Prime Minister might soften on a conscience vote. Smith had spoken on the ABC’s Insiders program the previous day to argue his bill was the best chance the Liberals would get to change the Marriage Act in a way that offered exemptions for priests and churches. In another show of confidence, he had emailed the draft law to every Liberal in Parliament so they knew what they would be voting on. His conversation with Turnbull turned to Newspoll instead.

  ‘Dean, I’m the only thing the Liberal Party has got going for it,’ Turnbull said.

  ‘I beg your pardon, Malcolm?’ Smith replied. ‘That’s a big call.’

  Turnbull was sure of it. The Newspoll showed the government was trailing as usual, 47 per cent to 53 per cent behind Labor in two-party terms, but it also showed that voters favoured Turnbull as preferred Prime Minister by 46 per cent to 31 per cent, the biggest margin of the year so far.8 Smith tried to bring Turnbull back to the marriage debate. He wanted to prod the Prime Minister about his assurance in their phone call two years earlier. We’ll get there together.

  ‘Do you remember that phone conversation with me the night Tony announced the plebiscite?’ Smith asked. Turnbull said he didn’t remember.

  Liberal politicians filed into their party room in Parliament House later that day knowing that cabinet ministers wanted an outcome that backed a ‘people’s vote’ rather than a free vote in Parliament. Work on the postal vote had gone much further than MPs thought. Dutton and Cormann were behind the idea and they had help from a young lawyer who found a way to fend off a legal challenge. Daniel Ward, an adviser to Brandis, knew the High Court might strike down a postal vote conducted by the Australian Electoral Commission. He devised a ‘survey’ by the Australian Bureau of Statistics instead, using the electoral roll to gather ‘statistics’ rather than ‘votes’ in the mail.9 Cabinet ministers had approved the idea at a meeting in Perth.

  Turnbull knew this as he took the chair in the party room shortly after four o’clock and called on MPs to speak. Smith and Entsch made their case, followed by Wilson and Zimmerman. Would others follow? Sarah Henderson, whose electorate of Corangamite was one of the government’s most marginal, believed in changing the law but was worried about giving up on a plebiscite because it was a commitment at the previous election. She knew the government risked losing voters if it broke an election pledge. Others agreed with her and the five rebels looked outnumbered.

  Turnbull seemed to have Smith in mind when he suggested the pressure for a free vote was much lower than the five rebels claimed. ‘I was in Western Australia all last week and not one person in the state raised it with me,’ he said. Smith felt the rebuke like a finger poking at his chest.

  Abbott told the meeting he wanted a full plebiscite and proceeded to blame Turnbull for failing to honour the election pledge by suggesting the postal survey instead. He expected voters to have to turn up to a polling booth to cast a ballot paper at a full plebiscite. Cormann was ready for this.

  ‘You might not recall this but at no stage did you ever once specify the form the plebiscite would take,’ Cormann told Abbott. ‘All we said was that we would take it to the people.’ The Finance Minister had come prepared by checking the transcripts. He could point to them to give everyone in the room more confidence they could back the postal survey without being blamed for a breach of an election promise. Turnbull prevailed with Cormann’s help. Cabinet put the ‘people’s vote’ into effect.

  Nothing mobilised Australians during the 45th Parliament like the marriage equality debate. Protests were held regularly to seek action on climate change, but the public vote on the Marriage Act led to large rallies that set the issue apart from all others. This was a rare moment when the arguments inside Parliament House registered with millions of those outside. About 15,000 people a
ttended an Equal Love rally in Melbourne at the end of August. The High Court approved the survey on 7 September in a unanimous decision. The support for change grew louder than the concerns over religious freedom or the anxiety over the effect of public debate on the mental health of young people questioning their sexuality. In the days after the court ruling, about 30,000 attended a Yes rally in Sydney.

  Turnbull campaigned alongside fellow Liberals in a way that showed their party was not dominated by opponents of gay rights, however strong the No case was within the party room. On 10 September, as Australians received their voting papers in the mail, he joined New South Wales Premier Gladys Berejiklian and other Liberals, including Zimmerman, at the New South Wales launch for a ‘Liberals and Nationals for Yes’ campaign.

  ‘I am voting yes because fundamentally, this is a question of fairness,’ Turnbull said.10 He was ‘utterly unpersuaded’ that his marriage to Lucy, over 38 years at that moment, was undermined by a gay union. ‘The threat to marriage is not gay couples. It is a lack of loving commitment — whether it is found in the form of neglect, indifference, cruelty or adultery, to name just a few manifestations of the loveless desert in which too many marriages come to grief.’

  Smith watched the arguments about equality with distress. The dismissal of same sex marriage from the most fervid opponents, like Lyle Shelton of the Australian Christian Lobby, carried a judgement he thought would harm LGBTIQ Australians. He wrote to Turnbull asking for more funding for mental health programs for those at risk. The funding only came in January, months too late in Smith’s view. It put more distance between himself and Turnbull.

  Bragg, now the head of the Liberals and Nationals for Yes campaign after his departure from Liberal Party headquarters, thought it wrong to suggest Turnbull should have done more to enact marriage equality as Prime Minister. He believed the public campaign could not be won by rainbow flags alone, given the inner-city communities were already supportive, and that Turnbull’s message about fairness was more effective for undecided voters.

  ‘People are entitled to quibble with the decisions and priorities of the government before the campaign started,’ Bragg said later.11 ‘Personally I would have favoured a conscience vote, but the party policy taken to an election was a plebiscite and that avenue had not been exhausted. Once the High Court said Australia could have a survey and a campaign, Turnbull worked to achieve it. As party leader, it was not a risk-free decision to launch Liberals and Nationals for Yes, but he did.’

  When the vote came in the postal survey, the result was 61.6 per cent in favour and 38.4 per cent against. The question was: ‘Should the law be changed to allow same-sex couples to marry?’ The count showed that 7.8 million said Yes and 4.9 million said No.

  The vote measured the gulf between the Liberal Party and the community, a reflection on the ‘base’ the party talked about so often. The Yes vote was 75 per cent in Abbott’s seat of Warringah, 57 per cent in Kevin Andrews’ seat of Menzies, 64 per cent in Eric Abetz’s state of Tasmania, 66 per cent in Michael Sukkar’s seat of Deakin, 60 per cent in Andrew Hastie’s seat of Canning and 58 per cent in Craig Kelly’s seat of Hughes. One of the fiercest Liberal opponents of the change, ACT Senator Zed Seselja, represented a territory where 74 per cent voted Yes.

  The Coalition’s own supporters were divided: 47 per cent of them opposed the change while 46 per cent were in favour, according to a November poll that coincided with the final survey results. Objections may have been stronger among the core group of Liberal Party members and volunteers, but this was anecdotal. The common refrain from the conservatives in Parliament and their allies in the media, that ‘the base’ did not want marriage equality, was an assertion rather than a fact based on public polling. It revealed the confusion and dissent among the Liberals over the true nature — and breadth — of their base. Were they only interested in appealing to a conservative rump? Their blurred vision suggested their squabbles would never end.

  James Paterson had an alternative marriage law ready to be supported by conservative Liberals and Nationals. The Victorian Senator was a libertarian by nature but his critics eyed him as a proxy for conservatives like Michael Sukkar, a man with the factional power in Victoria to decide whether Paterson won his next preselection and stayed in Parliament. Paterson insisted he was doing this out of conviction, that freedom of speech also meant freedom of faith. Paterson’s bill, released to selected media on Sunday night, 12 November, included more extensive provisions on religious freedom.12 One of them was to protect freedom of speech so that Australians could discuss their view of marriage without fear of legal penalties, but nobody had proven a need for this special treatment. A second proposal was an ‘anti-detriment clause’ to prevent governments taking action against someone with a traditional view of marriage. What governments were punishing people for that? A third was to guarantee parental rights to withdraw children from classes that conflicted with their values, a broad power beyond arguments about marriage.

  The Labor leader in the upper house, Penny Wong, had no time for Paterson’s suggestions. While the conservative Liberals hoped to find allies among strongly Christian members of the Labor caucus, they could not find enough of them to shift the vote. Even so, Turnbull had to keep the peace within his own ranks. On 22 November he announced a review into religious freedom to be chaired by former Attorney-General Philip Ruddock, a move that eased immediate pressure by creating a further challenge at some point in the future when the report was released. The Coalition repeated its habit of prolonging an argument and creating a trigger for a future dispute.

  The Paterson amendments were rejected when the Smith bill came to a vote in the Senate on 29 November. Also rejected was a proposal from Brandis to exempt civil celebrants from having to perform same sex marriages. The Yes case prevailed by 43 to 12 votes.13 Wong summed up what the new law meant for many Australians: ‘This Parliament, this country, accept you for who you are. Your love is not lesser and nor are you.’

  Smith used his speech to send a message to a Liberal Party that seemed incapable of settling a vexed social question without going to war with itself. ‘If there is a lesson for my party from this debate, it is that we should not fear free debates. We should not fear conscience,’ Smith said in his third reading speech. ‘At some later point, we should reflect on how we can avoid that tortured process from ever having to happen again.’ The answer seemed obvious: more free votes, fewer blame games, less infighting. But his advice fell on deaf ears.

  The closing stage of this long and fraught social reform came in the House of Representatives in early December, more than two years after Abbott blocked the attempt to hold a conscience vote in Parliament and chose instead to insist on a plebiscite. The only dividends from Abbott’s decision were the bitterness within his party, a pointless wait for gay Australians and the $80 million bill to taxpayers for holding a postal survey that Labor did not want, the Greens did not want, most independents did not want and many Liberals did not want. Abbott had proven the ability of his stubborn minority to browbeat the rest of the party room into an unnecessary plebiscite, but he emerged with nothing except delay.

  One speech stood out. Wilson claimed the title of ‘rainbow rebel’ for himself and his four Liberal colleagues because they had stood up to their own party on a point of conviction. He told the chamber of what it meant to be a ‘real Liberal’ in the words of Robert Menzies from 1965: ‘not the party of the past, not the conservative party dying hard on the last barricade’ but a party with a ‘forward-looking heart’. He damned those who took a ‘stop change at all costs’ approach by resisting marriage equality. ‘They have been prepared to discard numerous principles: parliamentary supremacy, representative democracy, our party’s tradition of a free vote, fiscal prudence and free speech.’

  Wilson ended by looking up to the public gallery and asking a final question: ‘Ryan Patrick Bolger, will you marry me?’ Bolger, his partner of a decade, was taken by surprise, but Wilson
had planned this for some time. He thought the legal argument over the amendments to the Marriage Act had begun to put ideas above people and he made a decision to speak from the heart. Bolger answered ‘yes’ from the gallery and his reply was read into Hansard. Bolger and Wilson were married the following March.

  An attempt to protect religious charities, which were worried about government funding cuts if they spoke up for traditional marriage, failed by 60 to 85 votes. It was one of the few moments when Turnbull joined the conservatives on one of their amendments, putting him on the same side of the chamber as Dutton, Morrison and their supporters. The closest vote came when Henderson called for civil marriage celebrants to gain the same right as priests and other ministers of religion to turn away a same sex couple. Turnbull voted for the amendment, as did most ministers, but it failed by 63 to 79. The unyielding Liberals, the ones Entsch called the ‘100 percenters’ who believed in marriage equality without amendment, crossed the floor to vote against most of their fellow Liberals. This group consisted of Entsch, Evans and Zimmerman, joined by a sole cabinet minister, Pyne, as well as Julia Banks, Jane Prentice, Andrew Laming and Sussan Ley. It alarmed Entsch that some of the amendments were openly supported by the Prime Minister because it raised the possibility that other MPs might peel off and change the bill.

  After more than two years of argument among the Liberals and Nationals over this reform, the frustrations of the campaign came through when Entsch had to give up the right to make the third reading speech, the final remarks before the bill became law. Pyne approached him to ask that Turnbull make the third reading speech instead. Entsch held out, but Pyne asked again, so Entsch relented in the name of party loyalty. He looked back on that moment with sadness. ‘To this day I regret that,’ he said later. What he lost was the opportunity to thank all those who had worked for change. What he kept was the memory of being pushed aside to help Turnbull, when he felt Turnbull had not helped him.