Photo: Flickr / Eva Rinaldi

Michelle Grattan reports in this morning’s Age:

MALCOLM Turnbull has described those who claim legalising gay marriage would undermine the institution as “dripping with the worst sort of hypocrisy”, in a speech defying the Coalition’s opposition to changing the law.

Mr Turnbull, a frontbencher who cannot vote for gay marriage because of Tony Abbott’s refusal to give Liberals a conscience vote, said the “deepest pools” of this hypocrisy were all too often found “among the most sanctimonious”.

“Let us be honest with each other. The threat to marriage is not the gays. It is a lack of loving commitment – whether it is found in the form of neglect, indifference, cruelty or adultery, to name just a few manifestations of the loveless desert in which too many marriages come to grief.”

(If you’d like a laugh, check out Andrew Bolt’s response, too.)

Turnbull knows how popular he is among the Liberal Party’s moderate wing, and will get huge street cred for this. Not to mention the street cred within his liberal electorate, too.

People talk of him splintering away from the Liberals and forming his own, middle ground party. I don’t think that’s likely. He has no chance of becoming prime minister if he does that, and that’s why he’s in the game.

This kind of press is terrible for Tony Abbot, too. He’s trying to assert himself over the party over increasing disquiet from his party’s moderates. He’d love to kick Turnbull to the curb, but he’s just too popular for Abbott to sanction him.