Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I also support the legislation before the chamber, the Electoral and Referendum Amendment (Improving Electoral Procedure) Bill 2012, but there are some issues around electoral and referendum amendment which need to be aired in debates such as this. This bill, others related to it and the acts that this bill amends are all about elections in Australia. Of course, Australia has the enviable reputation of being one of the most democratic countries in the world where everybody has the opportunity of voting on and having a say as to their government. It does to a degree, as other speakers have mentioned, raise this question as to the Australian public, who I think in their foolishness—but it was an election and it is a democracy—in 2007 did select Mr Kevin Rudd to lead the country as Prime Minister. He was, as senators would know, the leader of the Labor Party at the time and he confused and confounded a lot of commentators by actually leading the Labor Party to a victory over what history will show was one of the best governments that Australia has ever seen, the Howard government. I think Australians became too complacent and too relaxed and comfortable and thought they could have a bit of a flutter on a new approach, so Mr Rudd led the Labor Party to a quite significant victory. But in this democracy most Australians cannot understand how the Prime Minister they elected could suddenly overnight not be the Prime Minister anymore.

At that time Mr Rudd had offended some people; his polling was not showing too much in the way of support and most Australians could not understand him when he spoke in a language that was foreign to many Australians, but they had elected him. So Australians having elected Mr Rudd had this view that, if they did not like him anymore, if they thought he was doing the wrong thing or if they thought he did not quite live up to the promises he had made, then they, as voters in a democracy, would have the opportunity to get rid of Mr Rudd. But, lo and behold, Mr Rudd did not even face the voters at the next election as the Prime Minister and many Australians still raise with me—they stop me in the street and say this—how this can happen in a democracy.

We know about the faceless men and the way the Labor Party operates and it does raise the issue of this question: for all the time that we spend on electoral bills, electoral reform and this electoral and referendum amendment bill, what is it all about when some unelected people can decide that the person that the Australian public elected as Prime Minister should no longer be there? You also have to worry about our democracy when you see, by reading NSW Independent Commission Against Corruption reports, that a person—regrettably my namesake and I hasten to assure senators and anyone who is listening to this debate that it has nothing to do with me and that he is a Labor Party person from New South Wales while I am—