Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Does it? Thank you, Senator Brown. I stand corrected. It provided for the parliament. I do not have the Constitution in front of me, so I am doing something that is always dangerous to do and taking you at your word. However, let me say either the Commonwealth or the parliament—or whoever. The parliament should have law-making power over the territories. Why would that have been? Of course, I was not around at the time those debates were had, but one can imagine—and from my reading of history—that the founding fathers put section 122 into the Constitution because there was a belief that only fully fledged states of the new Commonwealth should have law-making power that was sacrosanct and that could not be challenged.

However, the territories—as I say, as a former territories minister, I have been a great supporter of the territories over the years—are relatively small. Their budgets are supported very substantially by the national government. The numbers of people in those territories, certainly at the time the Constitution was adopted, were—even as they relatively are today—smallish. Arrangements were put in place for those territories—again, all in the best interests of territorians, one might say—which provided, amongst other things, that the Commonwealth should have law-making power over the territories. There was this arrangement that the Governor-General could exercise the disallowance power. However, the Governor-General’s exercise of that power was always challengeable in parliament, so it was an instrument that could be disallowed by the parliament. We have been through this in an instance I mentioned previously, but this disallowance power has been used rarely by the Australian government and, even then, only where the national interest needed to be protected.

Senator Brown and I might wonder whether in the last instance, when the issue was euthanasia, which I have spoken of, the national interest needed protection. However, we had our vote on it at the time. As I recall, in that particular instance, the issue was not being determined by a government; it was being determined by a free vote. So, if Senator Brown and I wanted to blame someone there, we could not blame the government—and that would be the first time ever that Senator Brown would not have blamed the Howard government. When it rains, I think Senator Brown blames the Howard government. However, in that instance, it was a free vote.