Mathias Cormann (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

What we see here today is an attempt by a deeply divided Labor Party to frustrate the democratic process of this parliament. Let's be very clear. There is a part of the Labor Party, the backroom operators in the Labor Party, who do not like people across Australia to have the power to determine what they want to happen with their vote, what they want to happen with their preferences. The Labor Party is completely inconsistent in relation to this, because, as Senator Macdonald pointed out, we have a unanimous report from the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters asking the parliament to make these changes, to make these improvements—unanimous—which was delivered back in May 2014 and confirmed again in May 2015—the Labor Party members on that committee have actually been calling on the government to get on with it, to get it in place before the election.

It is not just the shadow minister—who, when I last looked, was still the spokesperson for the Labor Party; the spokesperson for the Labor Party as recently as yesterday—asking us to go ahead and make these changes, even though his party had decided not to go along with them. The spokesperson for the Labor Party, the shadow minister with responsibility for this area, is telling us to get on with it—but it is also the member for Bruce, who, I understand at the time, if not anymore, was the deputy chair of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. This is what Mr Griffin said on 18 April 2015:

The government should be acting on these recommendations and, if they’re going to, they need to hurry up because they’re running out of time.

Essentially, what is before the parliament is, for all intents and purposes, as Gary Gray himself says, about 80 to 85 per cent of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters recommendations. What we as the government have done is taken the recommendations, we have consulted widely in relation to them and we have formed the view on the best way forward. It is not 100 per cent of what was recommended, which is, of course, why the bill is going back to the committee for inquiry. It has already been referred to a parliamentary committee for inquiry and for report by 2 March. The Labor Party is deeply divided, so the Labor Party is keen to push this out.

The reason we need to act now is that the Electoral Commission have made very clear that they need about three months to manage an orderly implementation of these changes between the passage of this legislation and implementation on election. We think it is sensible to have a bit of spare capacity in relation to this. On 12 May 2015, Mr Gray, the official Labor Party spokesperson on electoral matters, said:

It would be a travesty It would be a travesty for Australian democracy if these careful and thoughtful reforms were not in place in time for the next federal election.