Malcolm Roberts (Queensland, Pauline Hanson's One Nation Party) Share this | Hansard source

One Nation want to acknowledge the government's work on this and we also want to acknowledge some facts on the history of this Electoral Legislation Amendment (Assurance of Senate Counting) Bill. We applaud the government for its work. We first raised this issue in the bill that I put forward. That bill was voted down. We want to acknowledge that the facts of the matter are that we found that the Senate election has never been audited properly and never been independently audited properly. We had some conversations at Senate estimates with the Australian Electoral Commission. They weren't satisfactory. We put together a bill and that was defeated, but it went then to the government. I want to applaud the government for taking up the bill and putting forward the bill, largely in much the same format and content as we originally proposed it. We acknowledge the government because it is very, very important in the Senate election that people can have confidence in the result of the Senate voting.

So this bill will now require an audit before the Senate election and immediately after the Senate election. That way we and the people of Australia will be very happy—or reassured—that the election is in fact representing the people's will.