Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr President. You are right; there is no point of order. But, if Senator Cormann is getting excited about representations of Mr Gray, let him get excited about the nature of the hearings today. In 20 years in the Senate, I have never experienced a committee deliberation such as that which went before JSCEM today.

I hope that Senator Cormann is aware now that on several occasions senators have sought to have the relevant department appear and explain the decisions made in this bill. It is such a farce that, when we had the AEC this morning, they told us we needed to talk to the Department of Finance. The AEC told us, 'Senators need to talk to the Department of Finance.' But the committee that you control—the numbers that the government and the Greens control on the electoral matters committee—have now blocked that three times. Anyone listening to this debate needs to understand that this behaviour is unprecedented. Mr President, I am glad that you are here, because you can hear this. When a Senate committee looks at a matter, particularly a matter of legislation, the most routine element of any Senate inquiry is to have the department appear and explain to senators the thinking of the government on why it has proceeded in a particular way.

Given the very short time frame we had to look at submissions to this inquiry, I looked at roughly the first 16 that came in. A fair proportion of them said that the explanatory memorandum does not even explain why the government has taken the particular path it has taken. Let's understand what that path is, because Senator Cormann likes to misrepresent Mr Gray and others, and indeed the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Matters. The government, the Greens and Senator Xenophon have chosen a path which is different to the path that was recommended by consensus by this committee. They have failed to explain that difference in the explanatory memorandum and they have blocked any attempt by senators to question the government on why they have chosen this particular path. It has been blocked three times now.

This is probably the best point in this discussion for me to highlight: I will move an amendment to this motion. That amendment is designed to ensure that we will have more time to deal with this matter more carefully. Any student of politics would understand that significant electoral reform—the most significant in 30 years—should involve appropriate scrutiny and consideration. That is what is not happening here.

Malcolm Turnbull might be keen to try to line up the ducks to rush to a double dissolution election, but that does not justify and it does not explain the lack of scrutiny—essentially, the violation of the rights of any senator in this chamber to look at a matter appropriately before we vote on it. As I said, in 20 years I have never seen a committee inquiry like this. Indeed, I understand that even when the Howard government had control in the Senate they did not deny a department providing evidence. This is the path that Senator Cormann does not understand. Maybe there is a bit of limitation in his experience as a senator when it comes to committee work in this place. For the government, through its numbers on this committee, to block the department from even appearing is farcical. It exposes what is really going on. Fortunately, Senator Cormann, either your stupidity or that of the chair of this committee or the other senators of this committee has exposed what is really happening here.

That is because the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Bill fails any sensible test of policymaking or indeed of parliamentary scrutiny. As you have seen already by Senator Cormann's conduct so far, the government likes to pretend that this legislation implements the recommendations of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters in its interim report on the conduct of the 2013 federal election, which indeed focused on Senate voting. But this is not correct. Any cursory glance at the now more than 106 submissions in this matter highlights that this is not correct.

It also highlights my other point, which is that there has been no explanation for why this is so. The only thing that we can do here is surmise about what went on in the back room between the government, or the coalition, the Greens and Senator Xenophon. It is no wonder that a fair proportion—and I will come to this point if I have time later—of people watching this are asking: why have the Greens been so naive here? What is occurring with this bill with the complicity of the Greens is worse than anything that happened when John Howard had control of the Senate. Can they not see where this is taking us? It seems not.

The Liberal Party and fellow travellers such as Senator Xenophon and Senator Di Natale like to say that their deal implements the substance of the JSCEM recommendations. I have even heard them say that it implements 85 per cent of the recommendations.