Australia's Labor party

WITH emotions running high across the political spectrum, Australia’s ruling Labor Party decided on December 3rd to drop its policy banning gay marriage. A day later, the party’s policy-making national conference in Sydney ditched another long-running ban, this time against selling Australian uranium to India. Cheers, hoots, standing ovations and shouts of support and dissent from both delegates on the conference floor and from demonstrators outside, attended both momentous decisions. The big question now is how they will affect the political fortunes of Julia Gillard, the prime minister, who had much riding on the conference’s twin outcomes.

For Ms Gillard, thanks mainly to her own handling of the issue, the gay-marriage decision harbours the bigger political problem. The federal Marriage Act had never been so specific about marriage before John Howard, the former conservative prime minister, had it amended seven years ago to be a “union of a man and a woman to the exclusion of all others”. In opposition at the time, and against grudging protests from some of its members, Labor accepted the change.

Pressure has since mounted on Labor to amend the law again to reflect changing attitudes in Australia. A recent opinion poll showed 62% of people for gay marriage and 31% against. At the conference Penny Wong, the minister for finance (who is openly lesbian, and with a partner who is expecting a child), co-sponsored an amendment with Andrew Barr (an openly gay parliamentarian). This changed Labor’s policy: “to ensure equal access to marriage under statute for all adult couples irrespective of sex who have a mutual commitment to a shared life”. The conference of about 400 delegates carried it on a voice vote.

Ms Gillard was among those who voted no. She proposed alongside it a motion that would allow Labor parliamentarians to vote according to their conscience if a bill to legalise gay marriage were to come before federal parliament. Such an arrangement would free them from party rules that oblige Labor parliamentarians to vote strictly according to party policy, or face expulsion. Ms Gillard’s “conscience vote” motion passed narrowly, by 208 votes to 184. Already, one Labor parliamentarian has signalled that he will introduce another bill when parliament resumes early next year that would change the Marriage Act in line with Labor’s new policy. Perversely, Ms Gillard’s conscience-vote plan is likely to sink that. If enough conservative Labor figures vote with the Liberal-National opposition, which already opposes gay marriage, the change would never pass through a parliament where Labor governs as a minority party.

In some ways, Ms Gillard’s stand has left her looking like an outsider in her own party. Her opposition to gay marriage has perplexed some of her colleagues. Originally from the Labor left, she has been quite open about publicly declaring her own life choices: she is an atheist who has chosen not to get married, but to live with her partner, Tim Mathieson, and not to have children so she could focus on a political career. Her explanation last month on why she opposed same-sex marriage was somewhat opaque. Marriage, she said, had “come to have a particular cultural status and role within our society, and I do not believe that should be changed”. At the Sydney conference, she offered no further argument against the proposed change.

As Ms Gillard sat silently through the debate Tanya Plibersek, another of her ministers, won roars of approval when she declared that “almost-equal is not good enough.” Two days earlier, the Labor-majority state parliament of Queensland passed legislation recognising same-sex civil partnerships (marriage law itself is in the federal provenance). Anna Bligh, Queensland’s premier, said at the Sydney conference how “overwhelmed” she was by the “emotional intensity” of public support her government had received for its change. All this will only make things more awkward for Ms Gillard when a gay-marriage bill is debated in federal parliament next year.

Ms Gillard’s proposal to end Labor’s ban on selling uranium to India was less hedged with contradictions, though it too is destined to prove divisive within the party. Australia has about 40% of the world’s known low-cost uranium reserves. America, Japan and South Korea are among its biggest customers. Labor has always opposed selling uranium to India because it has not signed the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, has tested nuclear weapons and does not rule out testing more. But as Australia pursues closer ties with the rising powers of Asia, the uranium ban has come to dog its relations with India.

In 2007 Mr Howard’s government lifted the ban, which had been observed by both sides. When Labor took power later that year under Kevin Rudd, Ms Gillard’s predecessor, it reimposed the ban. Ms Gillard had signalled recently that she would seek the party conference’s approval to lift the enforcement. When she did, she implored delegates to consider that Australia was living in the region of the “Asian century”, and that selling uranium to China, but not to India, “is not an intellectually defensible position”.

The debate split her own cabinet ministers along pro- and anti-nuclear lines that stretch back 30 years, to an era when the party was riven over whether Australia should mine its vast reserves of nuclear fuel or leave them in the ground. Martin Ferguson, the resources minister, argued that Australia could not expect to lecture other countries about cutting carbon emissions if, at the same time, it did not allow them the chance to pursue cleaner forms of energy, such as nuclear power. Any sales to India would be subject to a strict safeguards agreement. At least three of his ministerial colleagues were unconvinced. Anthony Albanese, the infrastructure minister, said Australia would be undermining the non-proliferation treaty if it sold uranium to India. When Ms Gillard’s motion passed by 206 to 185 votes, observers from India in the public gallery stood and applauded.

In Australia’s opinion polls, support for Ms Gillard’s government has been sinking. It has lost votes on the left to the Greens, and then its more conservative votes to the opposition coalition. For all its headline policy changes, this conference may do little to reverse that trend. Adopting gay marriage may stop the seepage of progressive votes. But the conference also agreed to another change that might well neutralise any such gains: it voted to adopt a policy of taking asylum-seekers who arrive by boat and sending them abroad for their refugee claims to be processed.

Yet Ms Gillard has ended the parliamentary year with some gains notched up. Her controversial legislation for a tax on carbon emissions to fight climate change recently passed both houses of parliament; it will start operating next July. An opinion poll on December 5th showed Labor’s first vote at a perilously low 31%. But Ms Gillard had increased to seven points her lead over Tony Abbott, the opposition leader, as preferred prime minister.