Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

In the details of what is being proposed now there are two examples that I clean forgot. They both concern the Senate—the upper house. One of them was the example of Mr Gough Whitlam. He found a sneaky way to manipulate the numbers in the upper house. He failed in his attempt because he made a mistake—a little technical mistake. But Bjelke-Petersen thought, 'That is a really good idea—I think I will do that.' Being smarter than Mr Whitlam, he succeeded in his manipulation. Gough Whitlam made the decision that we would doctor up the Senate for our own benefit and it brought him unstuck. His government fell.

The other one was JD Lang in New South Wales, who stacked the upper house to get whatever legislation he wanted through, and it backfired on him. He was written off and went into the abomination of history.

I think one of the things operating here—and a couple of commentators have mentioned this—is that you have political lightweights running the Liberal Party, people who have only been in politics for 10 minutes. They do not really understand this game at all. The commentator Alan Jones was saying this recently, and I think he is spot on. We have people here who do not know what they are doing. They think that by doing this they will get power. But what they do not understand is that the people out there see this as a rigging of the system so that the Liberals can do anything they want to do.

Have a look at Queensland: the biggest swing in Australian history when the government there thought they could do anything they liked. If you think the people of Australia are going to give you the power to do anything you like, that is another reason why they should not vote for you in a double dissolution. You have just created probably the strongest argument for not voting for you in the next election. They do not trust you and they put a bit of an insurance policy in there by voting for some of the small-party, independent people. They put an insurance policy in for themselves. If you remove the insurance policy—I think the most unhappy day that John Howard ever had was when he got control of the Senate. Some of the ratbag, extremist, super-rich corporate elements in his party forced him to do things that I do not think he would otherwise have done. The worst thing that happened to John Howard was losing control of the Senate.

The honourable member for Grayndler, in his remarks, said that we had to actually reason with the in-betweens; we had to have intellectual firepower in what we were putting forward. It had to be a reasoned decision, not just a rammed-through decision. Everyone in this House knows that in the two parties you just come in here—I never knew what I was voting for; I would ask the bloke beside me what I was voting for, and he would say, 'I've got no idea'. That is the party system. But suddenly you actually had to justify what you were doing to some independent-minded people that were not ALP and were not LNP. You had to justify your decisions. In the Senate—God bless Australia—they put in a number of people that are not just puppets on a string. If you want their vote, you have to convince them that what you are doing is the right thing to do. When you fail to convince them, you are going to rig the system so that you do not have to ask the people in the future. That is what is going on here: rigging the system. Maybe there are some exceptions to the rule, but it seems to me that every time people tried, through some sneaky device, to rig the system in their favour, the Australian people have been awake to them and have punished them very, very painfully.

Question agreed to.

Bill, as amended, agreed to.

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