Safeguards coming for postal gay survey

The federal government may agree to anti-vilification provisions as part of its postal survey on same-sex marriage.

Labor and the coalition have spent the weekend working on urgent safeguard legislation, to be passed by the end of the week, including requiring the need for authorisations on campaign material.

"Labor has asked the government to include a provision that would ban vilification - hate speech - and it looks at this stage like the government's prepared to agree to that," shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus told ABC radio on Monday.

But Liberal senator James Paterson said it was genuinely not possible for the government to regulate the content of people's communications during the postal survey.

The senator targeted calls for ensuring that the information provided in campaign material be true.

"Truth in advertising is almost certainly unconstitutional and a violation of the implied right to political communication," he told reporters in Canberra on Monday.

"I think we should be very careful about going further than we normally do for normal elections."