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

There have now been two attempts to have a meeting to prepare for the public meeting, which will be held tomorrow. I feel certain that Senator Conroy will go into much more detail with his personal experience, but my understanding of those meetings is that the agenda had been preset, the process had been preset, the hours of meeting had been preset, the people who would be invited to come and give evidence had been preset and there had been no attempt to go out into the public sphere and say, 'This is your opportunity, before the Senate actually debates the very urgent legislation, if you care, to come forward and have your say.' That was not offered to anyone, to the best of my knowledge. A lot of organisations and people in the wider community, who in the past have provided evidence to the committee, were not advised of the process, not able to attend at such very short notice or, with the time that was involved, said themselves that there was not sufficient time for them to prepare the research for their argument and so they did not come forward.

We have this offer to the Senate, which was for—I actually referred to it on Thursday as a 'discussion' or a 'chat' about the most significant change to electoral law in 30 years. This is changing the way the Senate, with the range of people who are involved in the Senate—this is making clear changes to how the voting process for the Senate will operate from now on. We do not believe that is sufficient. We think it is such a significant issue that there needs to be time for a wider debate around the process.

And that debate should not be just in this place. I know that we have had many long debates in this place about issues, some very urgent, and people are prepared to put the extra hours in so that there can be a debate, And I know committee processes can go on for a very long time in this place. But our concern on this side of the chamber is that we do not believe that these issues have been discussed widely enough in the community so that there is an understanding of the way that this part of the Electoral Act will operate. I cannot guarantee that by having a longer inquiry time that everybody in the community will fully understand how Senate voting operates. I wish that could happen, but I do not believe that just by having more time that everybody in the community will know. But I do believe that more people will have the opportunity to hear about the changes, to hear about how the changes could operate and to hear about what will be the future electoral voting process if there is a more extensive amount of time for people to have a discussion. And that could happen. One of the things that disappoints me most in this place is that at times we do not actually sit down and work out how we can make something happen but rather how we can force something through quickly or stop it.

At some stage in the last few months somebody must have thought that it is time now to move on an action that had been previously discussed in 2014 and 2015. I do not believe somebody had a moment of madness in the middle of the night and said: 'This is going to have to happen for the safety and security of our nation. We will have to push this forward in the next sitting of parliament.' I do not think that happened. This must have been planned over a significant period of time. But when that planning was being done, when the procedures were being put in place, it was not everyone in this place who had the chance to hear how that was going to happen. I do not know who was involved in those discussions; I just know people on this side were not. The Labor Party members of the joint standing committee were not actively involved in those discussions. But, as I said earlier, we found out in the media when we had people making commentary about what was going to happen, and, more particularly, why it was going to happen and what impact these particular changes would have on various people.

When this started happening, I went back and had a look at the papers that the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters had been using in 2014 and 2015. While I am not an expert in electoral processes, I did look at the evidence that was being put forward by academics and by various groups about their concerns about how the current system operates. I do see that there was a range of concern about how people could be elected with a very small primary percentage of the vote. I accept that. But that has been the case ever since I have been in this place; since we have been here, Mr Deputy President, there have been people elected into this chamber who have had small primary votes. That has been a reality. And people have been questioning that over that period of time.

I did see that there had been discussion about various ways that that issue could be addressed. There were a number of suggestions put forward, and over the last week, since we found out that this particular bill was so urgent and it had to happen, a number of commentators in the media have started writing again about the process of electoral voting in the Senate. There had been nothing in the media in the last four to five months—I do look at these issues to see what people are commentating on in the wider media, and there were no opinion pieces on electoral reform in the Senate. There was not a wide discussion in the various newspapers or the various fora about this, but in the last week there has been a bit and people talked about what had occurred in the inquiries in 2014 and 2015. They have talked about other options that had been on the table in that process and other discussions that there had been around the issues. The particular process that was recommended in 2015—the final recommendation in 2015—is not what is in this bill. If it were exactly the same proposal that the people who were gathered around in 2014, and then in the subsequent meetings in 2015, had agreed on there could have been an argument that 'you should have known about this and moved forward'. But it is not exactly the same proposal. It has similarities to it, but it is not the same proposal.