On the marriage equality postal survey

Niall Clugston writes: Re. “High Court allows the government to spend its slush fund on just about any old bullshit” (Friday)

Following on from the High Court decision on the same-sex marriage vote, is it possible that future elections could be conducted by a “statistical survey” rather than through the complicated procedures laid out by the Commonwealth Electoral Act? The Constitution says, in sections 7 and 24, that MPs should be “directly chosen by the people” but doesn’t mandate a precise method. The Constitution also says that the Governor-General “may cause writs to be issued for general elections of members of the House of Representatives” (s 32), and similarly that the “Governor of any State may cause writs to be issued” for Senate elections (section 12).

The Commonwealth Electoral Act (s 152) provides for the forms these writs “may” take. However, there doesn’t seem to be anything to stop the Governor-General and the Govenors, acting on the advice of the executive government, from issuing writs commanding the Australian Electoral Commission to step aside and allow the Australian Bureau of Statistics to conduct a voluntary postal survey to choose the next Parliament…

Michael Byrne writes:  Re. “Tony Abbott thinks sport is just sport. We think he needs a history lesson.” (Friday)

Charlie Lewis’s effort to equate the SSM campaign with the systemic evils of apartheid, Nazism and US racial segregation is an absurdity.  Same Sex Marriage is a United Nations construct. The Yogyakarta Principles of 2007 rose from a UN love in to set the creative basis of the notion of same sex marriage. The notion has become a motion, with the bandwagon well underway.

The authors of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights must surely be turning in their graves. In fact, one of them, Jacques Maritain, wrote as early as 1939 of the secular humanist understanding of life: “Prayer, miracle, supra-rational truths, the idea of sin and of grace, the evangelical beatitudes, the necessity of asceticism, of contemplation, of the means of the Cross – all this is either put in parenthesis or is once for all denied. In the concrete government of human life, reason is isolated from the supra-rational.” 

Reason and faith need to keep other in check; one without the other is dangerous.