Posted: May 17, 2018 7:13 am
Fenrir wrote:TBF, there was no constitutional reason for Australia to spend large amounts denigrating minorities by running a non-binding voluntary postal survey. Marriage equality could have been legalised at any time by a simple parliamentary procedure.
It was purely a mechanism for bigoted cowards in government to delay and obfuscate and generally avoid doing their job.
Not that it did them any good.
I was thinking of Ireland with the constitutional issue. From what I can gather both gay marriage and abortion are explicitly restricted by it, so a referendum would be the only way to overturn either.
The machinations that led to the Australian postal survey (it wasn't even a plebiscite if we're going to get technical) are a whole other story, but suffice it to say that as early as 2013 it had already been ruled that it wasn't a constitutional issue.