Cory Bernardi (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I note the chattering classes over there who once again are not prepared to listen but only to interject. The problem we have with Senator Conroy and Senator Polley over there is that they are defending the worst government in the history of this country. I will not take a lecture or any advice from a minister who has a track record of abject failure in his communications portfolio—except, as I say, in obtaining skiing holidays and accommodation from Eddie Obeid and others. He is very successful at ingratiating himself with billionaires but he is not so good at talking and communicating with the Australian people about the benefits of these programs. But I digress—and I should not be sidetracked by the rude interjections of Senator Conroy.

I want to come back to the point that the Labor Party think they are better conduits of information to the people than the people can obtain for themselves. They do not want fairness and balance; that has never been part of their DNA or their modus operandi. That is why we are seeing these changes in this bill coming forward. The first of these changes is one of the most significant—and it is one in which I have some expertise, as Senator Conroy will attest—and that is in communications directly with members of the public. This bill provides that communications do not have to be 'posted', in the literal sense of using Australia Post, but can be emailed and the use of the internet can apply. I make the point that in the last referendum, on 6 November 1999, that glorious day on which our constitutional provisions were upheld and our recognition of the constitutional monarchy was overwhelmingly supported by the Australia people, the AEC used the internet to communicate the yes/no case; it was available for people to download from the internet. The internet is not some mythical creature that has been invented by Senator Conroy—he may lay claim to Al Gore's legacy in this respect, but the point I would make is that the internet and the use of the internet is not necessarily changed by this bill. There is no specific provision in it. What this allows is for the AEC to email people on their database, which can be obtained by various other government departments, and that would then constitute the basis of an appropriate communication with the individual voter.

I think that is wrong, based on my own experience. I maintain perhaps one of the most extensive email lists of people right around the country, and I communicate with them on a regular basis. I certainly know that the Prime Minister's office is a subscriber to my email list, and I suspect that Senator Conroy's office is as well. I also know, because we can manage these things, that many of the email addresses we have, which people have put into our databases and which they subscribe to because they request my communications and my common-sense political message, change on a regular basis. I also know that many of them become inactive as people move to another email service provider or as they want to prevent spam from getting into their inboxes. You have this enormous problem that an email list and communication by email are only as good as the last email you sent. If the AEC or anyone else thinks they are communicating with people via their email addresses, if it is not done on a regular basis, they do not know whether that email address is live or not and whether they have been able to communicate with people.

Further to that, there are people who are not slaves to email. They do not check it every single day, or three, four or 15 times a day. They do not walk around with their heads down and eyes glued to their Blackberries. There are people who open emails once a week or once a month. They go on holidays. How can anyone with any certainty accept that this is an appropriate means of communicating about something as important as information in support of or against a referendum question—questions that will determine the future governance of our country? I am happy to have that open, and be satisfied as to this as an appropriate means, but please do not peddle this as something that is a necessary change in order to update ourselves to the latest communications. I understand that that is what the Attorney-General is putting out there.

The Attorney-General, I have found, is a man of limited credibility: I was on the ABC with him once and I caught him telling a direct untruth. I have never rated him particularly highly ever since. How can you have a man saying one thing and then contradicting himself a moment later, saying he is telling the truth? It beggars belief. I am sure that one of his statements was true; I am not sure which one. We are wise to be cynical about that aspect of it.

The other thing I think we should be cynical about is this determination to communicate with households and not directly with voters. I think it makes many presumptions, not the least of which is that someone who opens a letter addressed to the householder is instantly going to share that with every other eligible person in their family. That simply does not happen, and I will come back to that in a moment. The other aspect is, and I do not know how many other people are like this, that when I get mail addressed to the householder it is not on my priority list of things to open. Sometimes they come in yellow envelopes with marketing material and promotional stuff; other times you just know that they are what I would term political junk mail or propaganda. If it is not personally addressed to you it takes on a far lesser importance. How can anyone seriously suggest that a constitutional change is somehow of lesser importance than a directly addressed letter from your local politician talking about the latest mumbo jumbo that they have achieved in parliament?

Last year, if I recall, we got directly addressed mail in my electorate from a government minister talking about how the path to surplus had been re-established, that we were going to have a surplus next year, that deficits were over and the global financial crisis was behind us and that the government's management of the economy was so stellar and sterling. We now know that it was all nonsense—and arrant nonsense at that. They spent the money to address that personally to each individual elector in that division. This government thinks it is okay to peddle that sort of nonsense and propaganda in a directly addressed mail piece, yet they do not think it is appropriate for the AEC to communicate directly with the Australian voter about something as serious as a constitutional change. It beggars belief and puts into perspective, once again, the priorities of this government.

A further point that I would like to touch on, which Senator Fierravanti-Wells also addressed, is the use of public money to promote or dissuade people from taking a particular point of view in a referendum. I believe it is absolutely appropriate for governments of any political stripe to fund a yes case and a no case for referendum questions. It is appropriate to put forward provisions, within budgets and within our governance arrangements, to have essential information communicated in a non-partisan fashion to the Australian people for them to make up their minds. It is then up to organisations or groups or individuals who want to facilitate that and enhance that communication to run their respective campaigns. If governments want to fund their respective campaigns outside the necessary provisions of the Electoral Act, then they should do so in an equal and bipartisan manner. It does not matter whether I agree or disagree with what has been put forward or the necessity of it.

Our Constitution, by some great quirk of fate or some ingenious design, has served us very well through good times and bad, through crisis and through any number of challenges. But the challenge we have before us is that governments may seek to game the system. And that is what we have. When they are seeking to game the system, we are all wise to ask the question, 'Why?' This bill allows—notwithstanding what the government may say—a clearly partisan funding of one side of a proposal to reform or change our Constitution. That means Labor's great dream of centralising power in Canberra—bypassing the states and allowing the Canberra bureaucrats or the Canberra politicians to control local communities and decisions that take place in them—can be funded to the tune of millions of dollars, or maybe tens of millions of dollars, while the common-sense proposition of saying, 'Hang on, it's dangerous to concentrate power in Canberra. We need the checks and balances offered by the federalist system,' will not receive any funding.

If that provision exists, given the track record of this government to use their legislative power and their executive decision-making power in partisan fashion in a desperate attempt to cling to power, how can we trust them to play an even hand at the forthcoming referendum? The simple answer to that is that we cannot. The Australian people know that we cannot trust this government and they know that we cannot trust their agenda, because what they have said successively over the last six years has been borne out to be false, again and again. They have not delivered on the promises they said they would deliver, they have broken promises they said they would not break, and they have delivered and squandered budget deficits with huge amounts of debt for this country. Now they somehow want to shackle local communities to decision making in Canberra. That is what the next referendum is all about: concentrating power in this place. I happen to believe, in principle and politically, that we should be allowing decision making to be made closer to the people, because those decisions will always be more relevant to their needs than to ours.

This bill is being rushed into this place today to allow these new provisions—which I believe are wholly unnecessary for a fair and balanced case to be put forward—to be applied to the forthcoming referendum. I believe it is a referendum that is destined to fail, because, from what I can pick up, it is opposed by the majority of states, and the Australian people think it is, at best, a third- or fourth-rate issue, with less than 30 per cent of the populace wanting to support it. Yet notwithstanding that evidence, notwithstanding the evidence from the AEC that says you need at least 26 weeks to build an appropriate case to support a constitutional referendum, notwithstanding the Spiegelman inquiry saying, 'Don't put it forward at this next election,' and notwithstanding the fact that no-one out there is talking about this, the government is proceeding with it in the hope that it will somehow slip through in the anger, the disappointment and the sense of disillusionment that people have in this government.

The government is hoping that it will be able to run a magnificent distraction that will have one of two results. It might allow the government to cling to a couple of seats because people are distracted by this referendum question or, if no-one is interested in it—I assure you that people will become interested when they know exactly what it is all about—if people are not really engaged in it and they just focus on anger at the government, somehow it might slip through and get a yes vote. That is the strategy here. I think it is quite clear to see. It is once again duplicitous. It is deception by a government that is absolutely desperate to take the focus off its own failings.

This bill is not in the interests of the Australian people because it is overriding the bipartisanship that has hitherto applied to referendum questions, where both sides have an equal say, where both sides receive equal funding, just as they did on that glorious day on 6 November 1999—a glorious day. This government is seeking to challenge that. This government is seeking to overturn convention, as it does. It does not respect tradition. It does not respect the separation of powers and the wisdom of that. It does not respect the innate virtue of allowing the Australian people to determine, in their own fashion, unpressured, whether they think Canberra based politicians and bureaucrats should have more power over their local communities. That is why it concerns me.

I support the amendments that are going to be put forward by the opposition because they will improve a bad bill, but this bill is unnecessary and should not stand.