Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Whatever you like, Senator. The fact is that in Victoria the Greens got over nine per cent of the vote and Family First got just over one per cent of the vote, and it was the Labor Party preferences that made the crucial difference there. I do not know what your vote was.

I would expect that Senator Fielding, who has the crucial role, would be here at the moment defending the failure of that speech yesterday and giving some sense to the crucial position that he has taken. He was not here through the series of very important motions that we divided on a while ago, and he is not here now, and I think that is an extraordinary dereliction of duty by Family First. Senators have a duty to be right on top of legislation like this and to make considered votes based on what goes on inside the chamber. I do not know what goes on outside the chamber. I do not know what it is that has motivated Family First to put an argument against this legislation and then vote for it, but that has not been comprehensible to anybody who has been in this chamber watching this piece of legislation move towards finality. Thank you, Family First. Family First is effectively voting to limited the diversity of media that families in this country see.

Having disparaged the ability of families—ordinary Australians—to discern that it is good for them that they should have greater diversity, not less diversity, Senator Fielding effectively says that families do not care. What nonsense! What a put-down of families in Australia that is. There are great concerns about this potential concentration of media ownership and foreign ownership of what we read and see—the news gathering that we get put before us. Family First say, ‘We’ll vote with the government to do just that.’ That is an extraordinary dereliction of the commitments that Family First say they have to average Australians, who are being sold out here this morning in this Senate in Senator Fielding’s absence.