Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise too tonight to speak on the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Bill 2016 and to put my remarks on the record with regard to this outrageous piece of legislation that we are seeing pushed through the Senate with what I think can easily be described as unseemly haste and with a degree of arrogance and hubris from those who will inflict this on the Australian people despite 30 years of our electoral reform holding us in good stead and delivering for us a very stable democracy that has become increasingly representative of the breadth of views and the different types of talents that are happily an indication of the sophisticated country that we are.

What disappoints me about this particular piece of legislation is that it is dressed up as reform. There is a saying—a monkey in silk is a monkey no less. This is absolutely not reform; it is something much other than reform. As members of the Labor Party, we do not believe that by putting a sticker that reads 'reform' on a piece of legislation that it constitutes reform. The window dressing might be good enough for the grand alliance, the Greens, the National Party and the Liberal Party—now one great and awful alliance—but it is deeply concerning to see that the Liberals and the Greens announce a deal that will favour themselves. The Green party politicians, the Liberal party politicians and the National Party politicians believe in this abortive and arrogant way of proceeding in the chamber to bring about the most significant change to our operation as a nation in 30 years.

The proposal that the Greens and the coalition have put forward with this piece of legislation effectively consigns three million votes to the bin. In the last election, more than three million Australians exercised a vote for a party other than one of the major parties. I always find it hard to understand why people would not just automatically and every time vote Labor. The reality is we have a range of views in our community and there are people who do not want to vote for the Labor Party but they do not want to vote for the coalition party. They do not want to vote for the National Party, who are letting them down profoundly, particularly in regional Australia on the areas of health and education. Of course I can understand why many people who might have voted National before will not be voting again for them this time. But there are people who do not want to vote for the Greens either.

What they did in that last election was—and there are three million Australians who made this decision with their vote—vote for candidates other than from these larger parties which dominate the political landscape of the country. It looks like the legislation will get through because of this dirty deal. Three million people voted at the last election for candidates other than those from these three parties. Their votes are going to 'exhaust'. They are 'exhausted' simply means they are not counted. They are going to end up not being involved in the election of anyone. Twenty-five per cent of the voting public will end up with no representation of their view of who should be here, and that hardly seems fair.

The Senate is supposed to represent more than three main parties. I bemoaned much of the commentary here in the chamber over the last couple of sessions, where people have been speaking about their delight with what they are trying to enact here. It is supposed to be a positive for democracy that we have a range of views. It can hardly be a positive for democracy when you construct a system and do a deal here in the Senate to discount the value of the votes of three million Australians. I do not think you can possibly consider it reform to leave three million people and their will out of the democratic process—not just delete them out, but to actually construct a model which will exclude them from registering that kind of response.

Imagine if the Liberals were in control of the Senate when Tony Abbott was Prime Minister? That is what is being cooked up here—control of the Senate by the Liberal and conservative forces of this country. Already we would have seen them implement their 2014 budget. They would have just been able to do it. They would have just got the rubber-stamp and said, 'Here, off we go—let's do it!' Students would now have been in a deregulated market and paying $100,000 for a university degree. We would have seen cuts to Medicare. We would have seen the $7 GP tax become law. We would have seen further cuts to family payments from the ones we have already seen. We have been able to hold up so much of the worst excesses of this government.

Labor is absolutely up for reform. But just because the Liberals and the Greens have done a deal, drawn up this bill and put a 'reform' sticker on the front page does not mean this piece of legislation should be allowed to continue to masquerade as a piece of reform. Reform that entrenches the control of the right wing of the Liberal Party and reform that entrenches control of the balance of power to the Greens is not reform. It is a recipe for economic problems and it is a recipe for gridlock in Australian politics. When Labor looks at reform we want to make sure that it does not harm the interests of the Australian people. I support reforms that are sensible, but not reforms like this, that are constructed deliberately to wipe away every minor and different voice.

The bill was brought into the parliament by the Greens, and it reflects this deal that I have been talking about, done between the grand coalition of the Liberals, the Nationals and the Greens parties together. But in their haste to bring it in and in trying to pretend that it has come from the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters they have tried to muddy the situation so much that some clarity around its true status is a little hard to find.

The Senate system of voting recommended by the joint committee is not the system that is in the bill that has now come before us. What we are debating now is not what has come from JSCEM. It is what the Greens, the Liberal Party and the National Party decided was in their own interests. One of the key challenges in this deal is that future voting under this bill, which sees the biggest changes since 1984, means that people will have to vote in a very different way from what they have become accustomed to.

Our concern, as the Labor Party, arises from that change in practice and the increase in informal votes that is likely to flow from that. But we also have concerns that there are challenges, like how we present how-to-vote cards to our supporters, given the requirement to indicate one to 12 or one to six above the line on the ballot paper. This is going to be complicated and it is going to be very challenging. I was actually able to attend the hearing the other morning, which was in no way any representation of the best practices of this Senate. To see questions so controlled and contained by the chair that morning; to see the relevant committee prevent the finance department coming to that meeting to answer any questions and to see the gross misuse of the committee process to achieve this dirty deal was a real insult. It was an insult to the people of Australia and it was something that I will not forget. It was like something that I have seen at the movies, where people's rights were clearly removed. It was completely inappropriate.

These changes that look like we are going to have happen will give rise to a degree of complexity, as I have indicated, that will almost certainly lead to a rise in informal votes, and the proposed system that we see relies on a large number of voters exhausting their votes. We are not satisfied that it is democratic. It is easy to have suspicions about the intent behind this, because the stated aim of these reforms is, in fact, to wipe out minor party players. It is easy to be sceptical, which is not my general disposition towards life, but when the Liberals and the Greens are doing this with a clear and expressed hope to produce more senators of their own persuasions you can hardly call it a good piece of legislation—a fair piece of legislation. It is certainly not a reforming piece of legislation.

It is also very interesting that the Greens have decided that they are now the best minor party in the land. They have decided that they do not want anybody else to come in and have a go. Having been the beneficiaries of the system that we have had in place over the last 30 years and securing their place, now they want to pull up the drawbridge and everybody else can go home. They just want to stay here themselves and get rid of those other smaller parties.

From Labor's perspective these are very big changes which, as I have indicated, might mean a growing informal vote but which also mean that a lot of voters are going to have their ballot papers exhausted. That is not democracy in action and it is not support of diversity, and this display of the arrangement between the Greens, the Liberals and the National Party is absolutely nothing like a democratic kind of arrangement.

The Greens should go out amongst their voters and tell them that they have done another dirty deal—another dirty deal!—with the Liberal Party. In fact, through this piece of legislation and through putting their votes with the government of this day they are permanently providing a blocking vote in the Senate for the conservative forces. They have sacrificed all their principals on so many issues, but this is particularly iconic. They have sold out to the conservatives of this country.

The Greens are getting into bed with Mr Turnbull. Let's have a look at what it is that they have actually decided they are going to join up with. Mr Turnbull and Julie Bishop conspired to assassinate the duly-elected Prime Minister in his first term—Mr Abbott. The result is a deeply divided and dysfunctional government that is constantly contradicting itself and backflipping on itself. It is unable to provide any degree of certainty and security to the Australian population or to our businesses and our economy. They cannot even confirm, despite many requests to do so—that the budget will happen on the date for which it is indicated. They cannot even confirm that basic requirement of a government.