Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Hansard source

The opposition will be asking that the question be put separately on the procedural element of this motion, 'That this bill may proceed without formalities', and I wish to speak to the procedural part of that motion.

As people know, Labor will be opposing the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Bill 2016 and will be taking every opportunity to make that point in this chamber. We are taking the opportunity in terms of debating the procedural part of this motion to ensure that this place—and anyone outside who is listening—understands how seriously we take the attempt to move this particular bill with such speed through the parliament and to impose a debate that I do not believe the community is ready to have.

We have heard that the basis for this bill being brought forward is that there is a need for an urgent change to the way the Senate voting process occurs. Funnily enough, we will hear much in the next few days about the work of the wonderful Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, which puts the focus of these issues both in this place and in the areas of the community that are truly interested in the way our electoral system operates. We have heard that this joint committee met in 2014, had hearings in 2014 and then met again in 2015 and had hearings around the issues of Senate electoral reform which would best suit the needs of our community and our electoral system. From that time in June 2015 until a week and a half ago there had been no push at all to bring forward debate on this bill. There had been no discussion on the way forward and how we were going to move it.

Labor did not find out about the need for this urgent bill to come before parliament from a discussion with the relevant ministers, or from a discussion between the Leader of the Government in the Senate and the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate or from the Manager of Opposition Business saying to the Manager of Government Business in this place that there is a need to bring this legislation forward and to have this urgent but very short debate. I note that the media also said how it was so important that this be done quickly. We came into this chamber to hear about what was going to happen and were told that there would be a further meeting of the specialist committee that looks after electoral matters—that is, the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. There would be another opportunity for these skilled people who work in this field to draw together their knowledge and draw together people from across the community who are interested in electoral matters.

I have to admit that not everybody in the community is as obsessed about the way electoral matters operate as I wish they would be. There are not 1,000 people who want to come and give evidence to a joint committee on electoral matters, but there are many. We have a wide range of people in our community across the board who are skilled in electoral matters, skilled in the way elections operate and skilled in knowing the motives of different people bringing forward these changes. All of that is there. We were told that there would be this opportunity and not to worry. How dare we say that there could be something wrong in this process? We were putting out feigned concern.

We were told that there would be this meeting of the joint standing committee, and then we found out that it was going to be a half-day, a three-quarter-day and then back to a half-day meeting this week. In fact, we have been told that that meeting will be held tomorrow. We will have the formal meeting of the joint standing committee to look at exactly what the issues are around this debate in the middle of our formalities process. We found that out, and everybody in the Senate was welcomed to be a participating member of this committee. That was circularised late last week. We have placed Senator Conroy onto the committee and he did attend the only grouping of that committee late last week—