Conscience Votes
John Howard said it helped MPs “reflect upon their experiences, values”. Kim Beazley said it was “a wonderful thing” to do. The late John Button said, “Let the winds of principle blow through the House.”
They were talking about exercising a parliamentary conscience vote and were so enthusiastic for it you would imagine conscience votes happen all the time.
But they don’t, for reasons shared by leaders of all major parties. In fact they are rare. By my calculation there were 30 conscience votes in Federal Parliament between 1955 and now. (The always-splendid Parliamentary Library has this research paper.) Prime Minister Julia Gillard wants to make that tally 31 by tomorrow, asking the ALP national conference in Sydney for a conscience vote on gay marriage.
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