Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Mr President, I was so excited about trying to show to the people who might be listening to this just how hypocritical the Australian Labor Party is again on this particular issue. Senator Tillem is not a senator anymore, but, anyhow, I will do him the respect of saying that the then Senator Tillem was on it, as well as Senator Faulkner, Mr Gary Gray and Mr Alan Griffin. As the Labor Party was saying earlier today, Senator Faulkner is very good—a respected figure when it comes to processes and elections, and yet Senator Faulkner was part of the unanimous support for this particular process. So what has happened in the last couple of years? I do not know. The rest of the Labor Party wanted to go along with it and Mr Gary Gray wanted to go along with it—a guy who, I might say, was the National Secretary of the Labor Party when they had one of their best results at the federal election in the past 20 years. This is the Mr Gary Gray who understands these things. He is not afraid that this new proposal will give the coalition any advantage, because it will not, and Antony Green has proved that.

It is important for those who might be listening to this, as they drive home from work today, to know that the Labor Party are being completely hypocritical again on this electoral matters issue. Anyone listening to this might well remember that, following the 2013 election, there was spontaneous outrage across the spectrum and from every political commentator on how this country could be held to ransom by a couple of senators who were elected with less than two per cent of the vote. It was not a political thing. Anyone who was around at that time, which includes all of the Labor senators, will recall that there was spontaneous outrage across Australia. Every political commentator said the same thing—'This has to be addressed'—and every political commentator, even the left-wing ones, are now saying that the Labor Party have this wrong. It is the hypocrisy that I fear and it should be exposed. We know that the Labor Party do not stand for much. They do what they are told to do by the union movement, but this is just outrageous.

What we are trying to do with this bill and this report from the committee is make sure that the people of Australia determine who they vote for and who they give preferences to. Why does the Labor Party want to stop the ordinary people of Australia making their own decisions? If they want to vote for the Labor Party first, that is fine and, if they want to put me last, that is fine, but it is their decision. But, until now, the backroom boys in the Labor Party would register a ticket which would determine where the votes went. People who voted Labor may well have wanted a different one, and that is what this bill will do.

It is important that the process works. The government introduced a bill—I think it was passed by the lower house—which said: optional preferential above the line, but below the line would be the old system. You could vote where you liked, but you had to go from one to 115, or however many candidates there were, which was an onerous task that not many people, apart from myself and a few others, would do. The committee that met on Monday had a look at these issues and heard a lot of evidence on these issues. The committee—which had a majority, I might say, of government members—decided to recommend to parliament that the bill should be amended to include optional preferential below the line—one to 16. That is a committee of parliament having heard all the evidence saying to the government, 'Government, you actually should go back to what was recommended by the original committee back in 2014,' when Christine Milne was still the leader, by the way, Senator Collins.