Slade Brockman (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Amendment Bill 2022. The first point I wish to make is that it is extraordinarily hard to change the Australian Constitution. The Australian Constitution is the founding document of our parliamentary democracy, the founding document of our nation. It does represent what we aspire to be, and the drafters of our Constitution made it particularly difficult to change it. They set a very high bar and they did so for a very good reason. You do not want, particularly in a federation, where you have the coming together of states to form a nation, to have a founding document, a constitutional arrangement, that is very easy to change. To do so would, of course, invite chaos, where state and federal governments were never clear as to their responsibilities and roles in the nation and where they would find it extraordinarily difficult to navigate a change in environment in that way.

Mr Deputy President, if you look back on the history of Australian referendums, you'll see that only eight of 44 have been successful. That's a well-known statistic. Three of the eight that succeeded were held together, so actually there have been only six occasions when people have agreed with the proposals in front of them. So the Australian people, throughout our history, have shown a reluctance to change our foundational document. Referendums need to be very necessary and very well understood and discussed prior to being presented to the Australian people.

I look back now, with the benefit of hindsight, the benefit of history, at the proposals that the Australian people rejected and I think that in the vast majority of cases the Australian people got it right. A raft of early referendums were put up, perhaps unsurprisingly, by the federal parliament to extend and expand its powers after a number of initial High Court judgements that, quite rightly at the time, saw state government as having a very significant role in certain areas of public policy. It probably was, in fact, quite the reverse of the situation today and the situation over the last 50 years.

In those first 20 or 30 years of democracy, where the referendum proposals were about expanding the powers of this place, you had the outlying states actually supporting them. The vast majority of referendum proposals in the 1901-to-1930 period were actually supported by states like my home state of WA, South Australia, Tasmania and Queensland because at that time they had a very unique dynamic in that they were much smaller, much less economically developed and much more reliant on assistance from a small and albeit less powerful Commonwealth government.

So when presented with the opportunity to expand the powers of the Commonwealth government to perhaps gain a bit more support those smaller states actually voted yes, but the referendums failed because of the requirement that it be a majority of people in a majority of states. That was a very important check that the drafters of our Constitution put in place. As I said, in hindsight I suspect that every single one of those proposals would now be opposed by the voters in Western Australia, South Australia and Queensland—and I won't comment on Tasmania. I suspect they'd all vote against them, and quite rightly so. They were probably overreach at that time.

So we see regular referendum failures throughout our history. I want to highlight another one that failed. Again, if we look at it today I think we'd say: 'Goodness gracious. Was it ever even proposed to give this place, the Commonwealth parliament, the power to basically nationalise monopolies, to nationalise corporations or people in positions of significant commercial power within our nation?' Again, that was soundly defeated in a referendum where there were no 'yes' or 'no' cases presented, which had become the norm even at that point in our political democracy.

So you can see that the Australian people have over the course of our constitutional history been very reluctant to change our foundation document, and that is why it is so important—even more important I would argue in this day and age than in previous referenda—in an age of disinformation, in an age of misinformation and in an age where the sources of information available to people are both legion and in many case highly dubious, that we actually look at machinery bills, such as this one, and make sure they are crafted to achieve the outcome, which is giving the Voice to the Australian people's decision-making. That's why we in the coalition have raised a number of points—the need to restore the 'yes' and 'no' cases which were eliminated in the first draft of this bill, the importance of establishing those official 'yes' and 'no' campaign organisations that have become a part of our usual expectation of referendums proceeding, and appropriately funding the official organisations.

Once again we don't have to look back that far in history to see that the Labor Party has a very poor track record in these machinery provision bills. We only have to go back to 2013 to see the Labor Party then putting up a referendum on the recognition of local government. I point out that that had failed twice before, and so the Australian people had had their say on that proposal in the course of relatively recent political history. I believe—and this is just going from memory—it was in 1977 and 1988. That matter had been put before the Australian people at least two times before and the Australian people had quite resoundingly said that that was not something that they supported. There was a very particular set of circumstances around that bill. It was done as part of a deal to form government by the then Prime Minister, Julia Gillard, with Mr Windsor and Mr Oakeshott. In order to form a minority government with Labor, part of their demands was that a referendum on local government proceed. But the handling of that referendum was, to put it in its kindest light, highly dubious. Rather than equally funding a 'yes' and 'no' case, as had become the norm, the decision was taken to hand the 'yes' case $10 million and the 'no' case $500,000. I will say those numbers again, because it is an important fact to remember that, at the last referendum the Labor Party in government put forward, they were willing to fund the 'yes' case $10 million and the 'no' case $500,000.

This was done on the spurious basis that only a couple of members of parliament had voted against the bill. It was completely lacking any justification. The fact that only two members of parliament voted against the machinery provisions bill did not reflect their view on the final referendum outcome in any way, shape or form, just as the vote on this bill does not represent a view on a referendum outcome in any way, shape or form. Yet, at that time, Labor was willing to use the very paper-thin justification of the fact that there were only two votes against the referendum mechanism legislation to put in place unbalanced funding to the tune of $10 million for the 'yes' case and $500,000 for the 'no' case.

As it turned out, that referendum didn't go ahead, and the politics of that were very strange as well. Obviously, Prime Minister Gillard lost out to Prime Minister Rudd, and the election date changed by a week, slightly suspiciously, which meant the referendum was knocked off the agenda. I would be willing to put 10 quid on the fact that it was knocked off the agenda because they knew that referendum was going to go down and go down resoundingly. Regardless of how many people in this place voted against the referendum machinery bill, from working in politics at that time and talking very closely with large numbers of people, I know that, in my home state of Western Australia, even those inside local government at that time were extremely opposed to that referendum being successfully carried. So I suspect that, in the knowledge that that referendum was not only going to go down but was going to go down resoundingly and at a time of a federal election where the Labor Party had acted so inappropriately in funding the 'yes' case to the tune of $10 million and the 'no' case to the tune of $500,000, the election date just happened to be moved forward by a week so the referendum wouldn't go ahead.

So Labor, sadly, has form. This is an area where you cannot afford to be political. As I said earlier, there have been 44 referendums in Australia's history; eight passed. This is an area where you cannot allow politics to enter the fray. It can be a discussion—people can have legitimately different perspectives. But, when you start politicising those things, when you start treating different sides of an argument in different ways, when you start ruling out or ruling in the traditional way that we have approached these—an Australian commitment to fairness, a fair go—that is something that we on this side take very seriously indeed. Yes, the Labor government has acted on the 'yes' and 'no' case. I haven't yet looked at the amendment myself, but I certainly will do so. But it needs to go beyond that. The coalition and Senator Hume made the coalition's position very clear—that it needs to go beyond that. Labor needs to be committed to a referendum arrangement and structure that is fair, open, transparent; that deals properly with donation regimes and foreign interference; and that provides a plan for how the scrutiny of the referendum will be conducted.

So I say to those opposite and I say to all Australians: this is extremely important. It is hard to change our foundational document, and it should be hard to change our foundational document. It is a matter about which all Australians deserve the utmost chance to hear arguments for and against, to hear the case for and against. Without that, I think we leave ourselves in a very difficult and dangerous position as a democracy.