Carol Brown (Tasmania, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Families and Payments) Share this | Hansard source

Come in spinner—I mean, really! Talk about some transparency in donations: no, they are not interested in that. Already they have got their hackles up. They do not like it. They do not like people talking about it. It will be interesting to see whether the Greens and Senator Xenophon support these reforms. But, from what I have seen so far when we have been talking about the Senate voting bill, I cannot say I have much faith in this actually happening. It has become blatantly obvious that what the Greens say they stand for—what they espouse with great theatrics in this place—and what they actually do are not always the same thing.

A perfect example of this is the complete disregard for the committee processes that we have seen in the conduct of the inquiry into the Senate voting reform bill. The Greens and the coalition joined together to ensure that there was no real transparency and that there was no real scrutiny of the bill. As I said earlier in my contribution on the bill, we have heard each of the Greens speak at length about Senate committees and their importance to Senate processes. However, we have now seen that the Greens are more than happy to completely do away with real legislative scrutiny and review in order to ram these changes through this place. I highlighted earlier what an absolute farce this inquiry process has been. The laws that determine how representatives are elected to the national parliament should not be cooked up behind closed doors and rammed through the parliament in just a matter of days. (Time expired)