Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I take great pleasure in supporting the motion on the address given to us by Her Excellency the Governor-General. May I say at the outset that she is a most impressive Governor-General and her work as the most senior Australian under our constitution has gained great admiration around the country. I thank her for the job she is doing. The speech she delivered yesterday we all know was effectively written by the government—that is a part of the Westminster system, and we understand that—but we congratulate her on her presentation and thank her for opening this 43rd parliament.

She noted at the outset of the speech that she was the first female Governor-General at the same time that we have the first elected female Prime Minister. I would add to that that I am very pleased to be the leader of a party which has a predominance of females in its ranks, and that will become even more so when the senators elect join us in this House on 1 July next year. The honourable senator in moving this motion referred to Catherine Helen Spence, who I call the ‘mother of Federation’. She hailed from South Australia. She was a great worker for suffrage, including ensuring that females got the vote in federal parliament right from the outset, way ahead of what was then called the ‘mother country’ of the United Kingdom. But we have work to do yet, right across this country, to ensure that—not only in this parliament but in business and in decision making wherever it might be—there is proper representation for females. It is something we have not achieved yet and it is an area in which other countries similar to ours are way ahead—for example, Norway. Better female representation in the business sector is something where Australia lags right behind.

I note Senator Abetz’s rather negative response. He moved right at the end of his speech, almost as a desultory add-on, an amendment condemning the Gillard government for broken promises to the Australian people. I would be surprised if during this debate another amendment does not enter this place which condemns the opposition— the coalition, led by Mr Abbott—for the first egregious breach of a written commitment in the parliament. We are not talking about election commitments here; we are talking about commitments post election to ensure pairing of the Speaker and Deputy Speaker in the House of Representatives. There was a very public breach of a promise on a written agreement in order to try to gain political advantage, and it should be condemned.

The opposition is saying that the Prime Minister has changed at least some commitments made in the run-up to the election. It is time that the opposition understood that this is a minority government and that in the establishment of a minority government there has to be give and take and that this is something highly appreciated by the Australian people. I am very clearly aware that, without breaching unnecessarily any confidences, the Leader of the Opposition, Mr Abbott, was well prepared to make commitments in the post-election period—if necessary contrary to his pre-election promises—if it was going to help him become the leader of government. It is a case of, at best, the pot calling the kettle black for the coalition to move this amendment.

I move on in my speech on the address-in-reply to the much more positive outcomes that we are seeing unfold in our Australian democracy in the wake of the vote of the people of Australia on 21 August. That vote, amongst other things, went to the Australian Greens to the tune of 12 per cent in the House and 13 per cent in the Senate. It has meant a stronger complement of Greens coming into this parliament, though I hasten to add that that figure of, I think, 11.3 per cent in the House would translate to 15 to 17 Greens members in the House of Representatives if the principle of proportional representation were applied. Proportional representation or the simple dictum of one person, one vote, one value—if Greens voters were to be given equality with voters for Labor and Liberal—would mean 15 or more Greens members in the House of Representatives at the moment.

This is a question which is going to be dealt with increasingly in public discourse in the coming years. Democracy is based on one person, one vote, one value and our single member electorate system in the House, which has been in place for more than a hundred years, fails to deliver that outcome. Many other countries have moved to proportional representation. That does deliver a much greater equality of vote, and it needs to be fixed in our parliamentary system. It does not require a constitutional change. In fact, it was Katherine Helen Spence along with Tasmanian Attorney-General Clark who fought strongly to ensure that in the Constitution it was up to the parliament to determine the voting system for both houses. That enabled the Senate to become proportionally representative, at least at state level. There is an inequality, as we know, between the populations of the various states which leads to a weighting of the votes cast in them, but it was a necessary component of the coming together of the colonies to create the great Commonwealth that we have. However, it was not until the 1940s that proportional representation was applied to voting for the Senate. It is time that we looked at proportional representation being brought into the House to give us a fairer democracy and to give all voters greater equality in their vote.

Consequent to the election, I and my colleagues spoke with people on both sides of the two-party system which formerly ruled in the House. Of course, central to our deliberation was the election of Adam Bandt as the member for Melbourne and the first Greens MP elected to the House of Representatives at a full parliamentary election. We previously had Michael Organ elected at a by-election for Cunningham, which is in Wollongong, but this is the first time that in a full election a Greens candidate has been elected to the House of Representatives, despite the weight against it in the parliamentary system. We have seen three or four other seats in which, if you look at the two-party preferred outcome, it is a contest between the Greens and a candidate from another party. In each case it happens to be a candidate from the Labor Party, but in the future we are going to see Greens versus the coalition in seats around the country. The Greens will be moving to get a greater representation in the House and indeed in the Senate in the coming years. What we have seen here is that those people who voted Green know that they are getting value for their vote and that no longer can it be said that a vote for the Greens is a wasted vote. Quite to the contrary, a vote for the Greens is now a vote for a powerful voice in the national parliament.

In my dealings with the Hon. Julia Gillard, the Prime Minister, I have encountered a frank, honest, intelligent person. She has at all times lent me a courteous and listening ear as well as giving me a very correct presentation of her position as leader of the Australian Labor Party as she moved towards establishing the numbers, if you like, to become Prime Minister. I thank her for that.

We will have between the Australian Greens and the Australian Labor Party in the coming three years a very businesslike working relationship, and there will be sniping from the sidelines—it is from the opposition; we are used to that—because it is clear that Mr Abbott’s and the coalition’s position is to try to wreck this period of governance by being negative as we have just heard in that delivery from Senator Abetz. There is not much positive about it at all. That is the old—to use the new word—paradigm, the much overused word paradigm, but things will change. I, like the Prime Minister, invite the opposition to be positive and to take part in the establishment of policy as we go down the line. I will be talking about a couple of those things in the eight minutes left here, and my colleagues will expand on this in the debate in coming days.

Firstly, a climate change committee has been established and that has been well publicised. It involves people who believe that there should be a carbon price and who want to genuinely tackle climate change. One or two opposition people are shaking their heads at this moment because they feel excluded. They are very welcome to set up a climate sceptics’ committee and bring a report into the parliament as to why we should take no action in establishing a carbon price and why business should be—