Gary Nairn (Eden-Monaro, Liberal Party, Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

On this side of the parliament particularly. I do not think there has been too much defence from Queensland members on the other side of the parliament, or even support—because apparently the Labor Party supports this bill. If anybody thinks for a second that Mr Rudd, if he had been Prime Minister, would have brought forward a bill to amend the Commonwealth Electoral Act when Mr Beattie proposed the amalgamations, they have to be joking. There is no way in the world that a federal Labor government would have intervened in the way in which we have intervened. And we have intervened for a very good reason: we want to see democracy stand in this country. But there is no way in the world that a federal Labor government would have bothered at all. After we did intervene, the Labor Party obviously read the polls, or Hawker Britton did some focus groups up there in Queensland and probably said to the Labor Party: ‘You have got a real problem here. This is the biggest issue around in Queensland. If you don’t support this legislation that the Howard government has put forward, you are going to look pretty silly.’ So, after we made the announcement that we would intervene to allow democracy to take place in Queensland, he scurried along and said, ‘Me too, me too.’ He has all these ‘Me too, me too’ policies happening where he thinks it is good politics. So the focus groups said, ‘You have got to support this,’ and so Labor are supposedly supporting it. But they cannot simply support something that the Howard government brings forward; they have to move some sort of amendment. Looking at this amendment, it has two parts. All of a sudden, out of the blue, Labor want a referendum on constitutional recognition for local government. They have been in opposition now for 11½ years. I would have thought that if this were such a driving issue for the Labor Party we would have seen a private member’s bill from them at some stage during those 11½ years.

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