Arthur Sinodinos (NSW, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The big guns are here, Senator Conroy. Good to see you; good to see you getting educated in the ways of the Senate. I rise more in sorrow than in anger because the debate on the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Amendment Bill has been brought on by a government seeking to rush a series of machinery measures through that will allow it to facilitate, in its mind, a constitutional referendum proposed to be undertaken concurrently with the election which, to date, is still to be held on 14 September.

It is interesting that the bill implements a couple of recommendations, recommendation 3 and recommendation 11, of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs report of 2009, called A Time for Change: Yes/No? I say to those who are in the chamber or watching this debate: the government in 2013, almost at the death knell of its time in office, has suddenly woken up and said, 'This is the time to respond to the standing committee. This is the time to show the parliament respect as an executive by putting forward a bill to implement certain recommendations.' You ask yourself of this government: why, what is the motive? At the eleventh hour, five minutes to midnight, as the clock ticks down to 14 September, what is the government up to? Well, the government has decided for strategic reasons, for political reasons, that it would have a referendum in association with the next election—a referendum around constitutional recognition of local government. The government will say that in part it has been motivated by a number of court decisions which throw doubt on the capacity of the Commonwealth to directly fund local government. The history of referenda in this country is that very few of them succeed anyway, and those that do succeed do so after lengthy and fair consideration of the yes and no cases, and with adequate opportunity for the community to debate the measures, to consider the measures and to hear both sides of the case.

In this particular case, with the referendum slated for the election, it is understood that the Spiegelman report, which is the shorthand expression for the Expert Panel on Constitutional Recognition of Local Government, has pointed out that there is a need to ensure that the case for the proposed constitutional change is not left solely to politicians and to local government representatives. There is very good reason for this. The report goes on to say that, if the government wishes to have the referendum passed, other people in the community have to be convinced of the need for it to occur. We are only slightly over 100 sleeps away from 14 September, from election day, and the government has decided, as a last minute burst, that it will put up this particular referendum and argue the case. It is just trying to muddy the waters and confuse the voters. By bringing in this issue it is trying to create a constituency, or expand its constituency beyond its narrow trade union base, by seeking to get local governments, local councils and their supporters and stakeholders onside. This is politics; this is not about considered constitutional change. The way to get change in this country is to embrace both sides of politics in a genuine bipartisan consensus and then move to use that consensus as a basis to build public support for change. That is not what is happening here.

The Spiegelman report found, having commissioned research on the support for a proposed referendum, which has only just been announced in effect, that 'fewer than 30 per cent of voters can be said to feel a sufficiently strong commitment at this time to the idea of recognising local government to provide high confidence they would support it at a referendum.' So, at this very late stage, every indicator—including the Electoral Commission, which has indicated its concern about the amount of time available to disseminate information on this important matter—shows that a truncated period in which to prepare all of the information for the referendum would expose the referendum to the risk of insufficient information being made available. That is the problem. The government is truncating the space in which this issue will be considered. That will, therefore, further muddy the message coming out of this election, because this election pre-eminently has to be a referendum not on the constitution, not on the status of local government, but on a government which has undermined the process of government in this country. It is a government of which the members opposite are very much a part—the Gillard government.

There are a couple of amendments which are raised in the context of this machinery bill that I wish to address. The first has to do with recommendation 3 of the committee's report, which recommended that the Australian government introduce amendments to the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984 to require a yes/no pamphlet to be delivered to every household and not to every elector. The coalition opposed this recommendation in its dissenting report and believes that a yes/no pamphlet should be delivered to every single individual elector. Again, here is the spirit of collectivism that pervades this government. People are no longer people, they are no longer electors, they are no longer individual voters; they are part of a household and the household gets a pamphlet. Households can have more than one person in them, by definition. More than one person can share a household. Who gets the pamphlet? Who fights late at night over reading the yes/no case? Who has the right as an individual? We all have rights as individuals. One right is to have our government give us information as an individual, to be treated and recognised as an individual and not as part of a household.

The yes/no pamphlet is required by the existing 1984 act which was introduced by the Hawke government. It was no creation of the coalition. The yes/no pamphlet provided by the Electoral Commission highlights the yes case and the no case in one pamphlet. It was designed so every elector could make their decision on proper information. You could keep the pamphlet and refer to it; you could carry it on the bus on your way to work and refer to it. You did not have to share it with anybody else. Every elector, not household, should have the right to receive this information. By removing the word 'elector', the government is furthering another agenda: its agenda promoting automatic enrolment, where the commission finds ways to enrol you so you do not have to go to the effort of enrolling yourself.

We have had a long debate in this country about the role of voluntary voting versus compulsory voting. I happen to be in favour of compulsory voting. I think everybody should have a stake in democracy, everybody should own the decisions of that democracy and they should be forced to make those decisions if they are not willing to do so voluntarily. I think it works better that way. Perhaps it is a violation of some individual rights, but it is to meet a higher right, which is to make sure that democracy better reflects the outcomes of society as a whole. But in that context we should not make it too easy for people so that they say, 'Someone else will enrol me. I don't have to bother.' When you come of age it should be your priority to get enrolled and do it for yourself, not have the Electoral Commission do it for you. The government should not assume responsibility for enrolling citizens to vote. If we want to have a freer society, we have to keep enlarging the domain of freedom and not restrict it in such a way. We in the coalition are vigorously opposed to automatic enrolment and the use of government departments to provide the Electoral Commission with information to automatically enrol people to the electoral roll.

Another element to what is being contemplated under the first amendment I am addressing—and it was contemplated by the Special Minister of State in his second reading speech in the other place—is the use of email addresses for the sending of material. Material would be sent via email rather than posted. As some of my colleagues have indicated, Australia Post is a reliable and credible way to get information out. We have email addresses. Most of us, particularly younger people, have email addresses. We can have multiple email addresses, but we are meant to have one fixed residential address. That creates greater certainty in getting information to people. I am not an expert on the IT aspects of this, but there may well be greater opportunity for identity fraud and other issues when we use email addresses, particularly when there are multiple email addresses.

The bill also moves to implement recommendation 11 of the committee report to suspend subsection 11(4) of the Referendum (Machinery Provisions) Act 1984 until the end of polling day in 2013. That may sound fairly innocuous, but what does it mean? Subsection 11(4) generally limits the capacity of the Commonwealth to spend money in relation to a referendum other than on the production and delivery of a yes/no pamphlet. The committee proposed back in 2009 that any additional expenditure would be provided equally for the yes and no cases, but all that the government is proposing to do is suspend subsection 11(4) to election day. One pamphlet would be sent to a household and then the government would make up for it by having a big-spending, taxpayer funded advertising campaign without any provision for it to be a fair division of expenditure between the yes and no cases. This leaves it open for the government to do a big-spending campaign in cahoots with those who may support this particular referendum, free of any of any inhibition under subsection 11(4). We will be opposing this and will be moving amendments on both of the matters I have raised.

I want to come back to where I started, which is that this referendum at this time is a smokescreen. It is meant to muddy the waters, potentially confuse the electors and mess with the minds of stakeholders in the community in the context of what should be one of the most important elections in a decade—maybe in a generation—in setting the direction of this country. In the budget last night, the government sought to set the direction of this country for the next decade. It sought to lock those on this side of the house into a particular pattern of spending and tax them, reflecting what the Treasurer in the other house described as 'Labor values'. There is an election on 14 September which will decide what people think of those values and the values of those on this side of the house. Pre-eminently the election should be about the merits of the two sides of politics rather than be confusing with the referendum I mentioned before.

We are taking our time to debate this bill to make it clear to people that the only reason this is being brought forward is to facilitate a referendum in the context of this election. It is meant to confuse people. If we truly respect our constitution and the need for voters to make a considered change to the constitution, we have to give them the time to do that in a fair way. Along with my colleagues, I will be opposing this bill and moving amendments.