On Bluffing

You don’t need to have played poker to know the feeling. You find yourself in a position of weakness and you’re faced with a choice. You know that you’re beaten if they see your cards so your choices are to graciously fold and concede defeat or dramatically up the stakes and put the pressure back on the other guy.

Now it’s the other guy that has a choice to make. He’s pretty confident that if it comes to a showdown that he’s got you covered but what if you’re not bluffing after all? What if he calls your bluff and it all blows up in his face? Then what does he do?

This is the position that Malcolm Turnbull finds himself in at the moment with the right wing of his own party.

Everyone in Australia knows that gay marriage now has majority support within parliament and within the population as a whole. Notwithstanding the dramatic over-representation of Catholics in the upper echelons of politics, sooner or later marriage equality is gonna happen. Tony Abbott, Corey Bernardi, Kevin Andrews and co are going to lose. And yet they’re still making threats. Their collective message to Turnbull is that he’d better not allow a free vote or else they’ll throw the toys out of the cot and the Liberal party will descend into chaos.

Thing is though, they’re pretty obviously bluffing. What moves do they actually have at their disposal to undermine Turnbull that don’t end up with their mortal enemy Bill Shorten being the biggest beneficiary? They can’t challenge for the leadership because they don’t have a viable candidate and even if they did, the chaos of another switch would gift Labor the next election. Equally, they could form some sort of conservative splinter party but still wouldn’t stop the gay marriage vote and again Labor would be guaranteed to win the next election.

Put simply, it’s time for Malcolm to make a stand. At this point what does he have to lose?

Let me know what you think

Jez