Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too would like to contribute to the debate on the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Bill 2016. This is a bill which has been rushed through the parliament committee scrutiny processes so that the Prime Minister can call a double dissolution election, knowing that he has manipulated the way senators are elected and so that the current crossbench of this Senate will be wiped out and the Liberal-National coalition will gain eventual total control of the Australian Senate.

That is what this is about. The motivation of the government in bringing this bill on is to achieve lasting electoral dominance in the Senate for the conservative parties—the big Liberal and National parties, who want to destroy Medicare, who hate public education, who do not believe in climate change, who want to slash workers' superannuation, who despise working people and want to destroy their working conditions and who want to make higher education unaffordable for ordinary Australian families. They are the parties that oppose everything that is fundamental and fair and which is decent policy—policy which has been worked on and fought for by the Labor Party for over 100 years.

Complicit with the government in this deal to disenfranchise Australian voters and to install majority conservative governments is the Greens party. Senator Di Natale, the leader of the Greens, and his ragtag band of hangers on are up to their necks in this, because some of them will find it easier to get elected—some of them. In his desperate desire to be more than just a page 90 fashion shoot in GQ magazine, Senator Di Natale has decided to shelve any principles that he may have had and to shelve the principled stance of the Greens leaders before him, Senators Bob Brown and Christine Milne, who were principled—most times—when it came to dealing with the hard right of Australian politics. The Greens today, though, are all sanctimony, all spin and no spine at all. They are self interested—as are, indeed, the coalition.

This bill is of great significance to all Australians, that is why the Labor Party will scrutinise the bill extensively in the coming debate on it. The bill fundamentally changes how Australians elect the Senate. If it is successful in this place, it changes an electoral system that has been in place for 30 years. It does that by introducing optional preferential above-the-line voting for the Senate by numbering at least six boxes. It introduces a limited savings provision to ensure that a ballot is still formal where the voter has numbered one, or fewer than six boxes, above the line. It abolishes group and individual voting tickets. It introduces a restriction to prevent individuals holding relevant official positions in multiple parties and it also deals with the matter of parties having a logo on the ballot paper.

These are significant changes—big changes—and so this bill should have the opportunity to be properly scrutinised by the appropriate committee of the parliament. And it should be properly scrutinised by the Senate, because, rightly, most Australians think of the Senate as the house of review and expect senators here to review legislation—particularly significant legislation like this.

That is why the Labor senators are critical of the disgraceful so-called 'committee process' that the coalition and Greens pretend was a process of scrutiny and consideration. Just to go back a step: the coalition claims that the bill reflects the findings of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters of the parliament, which conducted an inquiry subsequent to the 2013 election. That inquiry was finalised last year. Despite claims by the government that this bill implements the findings of that joint standing committee of the federal parliament, the bill does not.

The bill includes new matters, and for that reason Labor insisted the current bill again be scrutinised by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters—a very well-regarded committee, not just within this parliament but also around the world. But that scrutiny process proved to be a complete farce. It minimised the scrutiny of the bill. It was an attempt by the government and the Greens, working together, to pull the wool over the eyes of all Australians.

The committee—the JSCEM, as we call it here—received 107 submissions on this bill from a range of interested parties in Australia, and, of those 100-plus submissions, only eight people were called forward to appear before the JSCEM when it had its public hearing into this significant bill. That hearing lasted 4½ hours. Labor senators were then advised at 9.40 pm, in the evening after that truncated hearing, that the committee's draft report was available for them to have a look at. That was a matter of hours. It just indicated to everybody in the Labor Party that the report had basically already been written before the hearing had been held. Then Labor senators were given until eight o'clock the following morning to provide dissenting reports. Here was a draft report on the most significant change to Australia's electoral system in 30 years, and Labor senators had overnight to have a look at it and to provide dissenting comments. It was a farcical process.

At the hearing itself, which most of us watched, as it was broadcast here—it was well attended, of course, by the crossbench senators—people were shut off, unable to ask questions and not given time to fully explore the issues that they wanted to explore and should have been given the opportunity to explore in that committee hearing. There is no way that a bill like this can be properly scrutinised with only one public hearing that lasts just over four hours. The alleged scrutiny process also did not allow time for people to put in significant, considered submissions, but we thank the people who did put in submissions.

What was the rush? Why couldn't the committee have had longer to consider this bill, which I understand from evidence at that committee hearing was concocted by the coalition, probably in consultation with the Greens, without any input from the Electoral Commission? That is the Electoral Commission that works out the electoral system in this country and applies it. It is because, as I said before, this Prime Minister wants to set up a double-dissolution election and wipe out the crossbench. He wants to wipe them out because neither he nor the Prime Minister before him, Mr Abbott, has been able to work effectively with the crossbench. There have been two coalition governments, the Abbott and the Turnbull governments, and neither figured out how to negotiate successfully with the crossbench. And neither figured out that, if their legislation was not passing the Senate, it was not because the crossbench were being recalcitrant and not because Labor were the bad guys; it was because the legislation itself was bad and should not have been supported. But, instead of devising legislation that would pass the Senate, out comes the double-dissolution sledgehammer and the electoral reform that goes with it.

Labor have always said that we are willing to look at some type of electoral reform. We know that the system is not perfect, and we acknowledge that there are limited concerns about aspects of the Senate election process. Anybody who has been confronted in the Senate voting booth with those massive ballot papers—70 or more candidates to vote for if you wish to vote below the line—knows it is very difficult without spoiling your vote. But we are not convinced that this bill is the way forward.

Australian voters have spent 30 years voting 1 above the line. At the 2013 federal election, more than 96 per cent of Australians voted that way. Following that election, we did see more Independent and microparty senators take a seat in this place. As much as the government hates that, that is democracy in action. That is how it is. That is how the Australian parliament was elected. It is not unusual for the government of the day not to have the numbers in the federal parliament. It is not unusual. In fact, having the numbers is rare, and it has only happened twice in history. In the most recent instance where a coalition government had the numbers in the Senate, it ended very, very badly for that coalition government because the people of Australia do not like one party to have control of the Senate.

The legislation is probably the most self-serving piece of legislation to come into this place in recent memory. As I said, it was primarily concocted by the government to serve the interests of the government, to seize control of this place.

You have to ask: what are the Greens getting for this deal with the coalition? I laughed out loud when I read that Senator Mathias Cormann had appeared on Sky News and had denied that he had considered the impact of this legislation on the preference deals that his party is doing with the Greens. I had to laugh. He outright rejected suggestions that the government had considered how this legislation might benefit the government at the expense of the opposition. With a straight face, he said his 'simple objective' was 'to ensure that the Australian people have the opportunity to direct' what happens to their preferences and who is elected to the Senate. But we all know that the principal beneficiary of this new voting system will be his party, the Liberal Party.

The bill is designed to exhaust preferences early to deprive Independents and the so-called microparties like the Motoring Enthusiast Party, which my senatorial colleague Senator Muir represents—he will soon speak on this bill—of votes so that senators like Senator Muir do not get elected. We all know that preference negotiations and lower house deals between the Greens and the coalition are at the heart of the changes. The idea that Senator Cormann, a senior cabinet minister, has not given any consideration to the impact of the bill in the context of preference deals with the Greens is laughable.

As I said, the current Australian Senate electoral system has been in place since 1983. Back then the newly elected Labor government removed a number of constrictions that had impacted past elections, and we established the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Reform, now called the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters.

That committee, when it is treated with respect and is allowed to do its work properly, has given rise to significant changes to Australia's voting system such as printing of party affiliations on the ballot paper; the introduction of party financing laws; and the creation of the independent Australian Electoral Commission.

Consequently, the Electoral Commission has worked closely with the committee to maintain an effective implementation of the will of the parliament in the electoral field. However, that close collaboration was not seen in the creation of this bill and in the parliamentary scrutiny process that should have been applied to this bill through the JCSEM process.

We know that at the last federal election we saw record levels of support for minor parties and independents in both the House and Senate. Support for non-major party candidates reached 21.1 per cent in the other place, representing more than one in five votes; and, in this place, support for non-major party candidates soared, reaching over 32 per cent.

Non-major party support in the Senate has always been greater than in the House of Representatives, but the 2013 record surpassed the results of the 2010 election as well as the 1998 election when 25 per cent of the vote was received by the One Nation Party. But minor and party independent support has been above 19 per cent in the Senate for every election since 1996. It challenges us in the Labor Party as to why that increase in support for minor parties and independents is so.

I think it indicates that Australians are dissatisfied to some extent with their political representation—and it was blindingly obvious in the 2013 Senate result. However, Labor Senators do not think that addressing the issue should be by manipulating the Senate election system. It should not attempt to be remedied by changing the rules to make it harder for independent and minor parties to join the Senate and, importantly, making it easier for the conservatives to seize complete control of the Senate. That is why we continue to say that we will look at sensible Senate reform but we will not consider, we will not contemplate and we will not support this reform before this parliament, because it is intended to implement the potential for Prime Minister Turnbull to go to a double-dissolution election and wipe out the Senate crossbench that was elected in the 2013 federal election.

There is an opportunity here though, while we are addressing electoral reform, to make some positive changes, and the Labor Party has proposed some amendments to deal with that. Those amendments go to the issue of political donation laws. I have been in this place for a while and I know that Labor has attempted many times to change the laws regarding transparency and accountability for political donations. My former well-regarded senatorial colleague Senator John Faulkner was passionate about this, but his electoral reform in this regard could not pass the Senate: it was thwarted by the Senate and opposed by the conservative parties opposite.

So Labor will move some more amendments to this particular piece of legislation to lower the disclosure threshold for political donations from $10,000 to $1000; ban foreign donations; restrict anonymous donations; and prevent donation splitting to avoid disclosure. It is essential for the purposes of transparency in our political donation system that the information about who is making donations to political parties and members of parliament should be publicly available—and lower levels of political donations—otherwise the political donation system can be gamed.

I look forward to seeing how the sanctimonious Greens and Senator Xenophon vote on those amendments. Both of them like to put themselves forward as paragons of virtue when it comes to political donations—however, we know that both the Greens and Senator Xenophon have been recipients of corporate donations. I would hope that they will support Labor's amendments.

Talking about amendments to this legislation, I note there is a raft of amendments from the government to its own legislation—and that is a factor of the way this legislation was cobbled together, and concocted by the Prime Minister, to facilitate a double-dissolution election without regard for due parliamentary process. If there had been proper parliamentary scrutiny on this legislation, then we would not be in a situation where the government was having to amend its own bill, because—shock, horror—'We examined it in such a rush that now we've found that there are mistakes in it.'

You should always have a scrutiny process for such significant pieces of legislation—especially one that fundamentally changes the way the Senate of the Australian parliament is elected—to avoid a situation where the government is going to have to come in and say, 'Oh my God: we've made a mistake. Here are some amendments.' It will just delay the process but, nevertheless, Labor will take the opportunity in the committee stage, which the government has brought upon itself, to examine in forensic detail the implications of this legislation for the future of the Australian Senate and the ability for people from beyond the major parties to put themselves forward for election; and for the Australian public to have the opportunity to vote for crossbench senators, micro and smaller parties, if that is their wish.

It is incumbent upon the major parties, if we are disturbed about the amount of the Senate votes that are going to crossbench and minor parties, to examine our own policies to understand why that is the case. It is not up to us to support this appalling retrograde legislation that will deny the voters of Australia the right to choose who they want to represent them in the Senate. It is not up to us to support this legislation that will fundamentally change the Senate in Australia, enshrine dominance by governments like the Turnbull and the Abbott governments—like all of the coalition governments, all of the conservative governments—and then wreak havoc upon the fairness and the dignity of the Australian community.