Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Government of the people, by the people and for the people. For centuries people across the world have been prepared to lay down their lives for this democratic ideal. They do it because democracy provides citizens with freedom, with prosperity and with opportunities to flourish. They do it because democracy allows people to speak freely and to shape their own destiny. We are blessed in this country that it is the ballot and not the bullet that decides fate. The founders of modern democracy also understood that democracy is imperfect, that it is fragile and that it needs constant work and attention. Mungo MacCallum summed it up really neatly recently in a piece he wrote when he said:

… democracy can be slow, inefficient and infuriating to the point where even the best-intentioned can be tempted to try something else. But as history has shown, any attempt at replacement invariably ends in tears.

So democracy has to be sustained, nurtured and at times improved …

We do not actually get the opportunity to improve our democracy in this place. Normally we are fighting the opposite trend—fighting against the slow erosion of democracy—but today is a one-in-30-year opportunity to improve our democracy, to take power out of the hands of us politicians and to give it back to you, the voter.

A basic principle of any democracy has to be that the wishes of voters are reflected in the outcome of an election. The current rules for Senate voting fail that test. The system is broken when someone's vote for a candidate or party with one set of policies flows to another candidate or party with the opposite set of policies. The system is broken when 0.5 per cent of the vote can elect a senator and 25 per cent of the vote produces exactly the same outcome. The system is broken when one person can register a number of front parties with the sole intent of funnelling preferences to themselves, giving them a greater chance of being elected. Antony Green got to the heart of the matter when he said, 'It rather strikes me that rewarding parties based on their vote is one of the purposes of an electoral system.'

It is for all of those reasons that the Greens have been campaigning on this reform for more than a decade—from my colleague Senator Lee Rhiannon, who has done a sterling job on this issue over recent weeks, to the New South Wales parliament back in 1999 when we advocated for these sorts of changes. We then had Bob Brown introduce legislation back in 2004 and later in 2008. In fact, it was part of our agreement with the Labor Party when we supported them in office.

It is true that we would have liked to have seen this legislation go further and address other vital issues—issues like political campaign finance reform. Our ability as a parliament to address issues like global warming, reform of the health system and growing income inequality is getting harder each day thanks to the influence of wealthy corporate donors. Those donations are a corrupting influence on good governance and something that the Greens have been railing against for decades. Yet every time we have put legislation before this parliament to restrict corporate donations both the Labor Party and the Liberal Party have voted against it.

I have also heard it said that some of these changes will lead to less diversity and fewer ordinary people being elected to the parliament. It is worth noting that there are 226 members of parliament. The vast majority of them are people you have never heard of. Many of them actually are ordinary people—people who did ordinary jobs before they were elected. Some people, unkindly, have said that some of us are very ordinary indeed.

The truth is that the problem here is the lack of diversity in political opinion. What we are seeing is a stifling conformity that means that all too often what we hear is only a stage-managed, overly-rehearsed political perspective that often someone does not believe and comes across to the Australian community as totally inauthentic. One of my colleagues from the Labor Party described some of this behaviour as the behaviour of lobotomised zombies. It happens because authority has been so centralised between each of the major parties that we get this stifling uniformity of views. It is something that does not happen in many similar Western democracies. It is one of the reasons that many people are looking to vote outside of the two major parties. They are looking for smaller parties.

Many smaller parties have made an important contribution to the national debate. People are voting for parties like the Animal Justice Party because they care about animal welfare standards. They are voting for parties like the Pirate Party and the Hemp Party because they believe in drug policy and law reform. They are parties that have made an important contribution to the national debate. To ensure that this continues we have insisted on a system that means that voters will need to allocate at least six preferences above the line or 12 preferences below the line. That means that there is now an active choice from the voter to think beyond the duopoly of Australian politics.

We fought to keep membership thresholds low, which is a feature of this legislation, and we have a bill before the parliament to lower the financial barrier to register for elections to encourage smaller parties to participate. But simply being a small player who brings a different perspective to the parliament is not reason enough to be elected. Just because you are small should not be enough to get you a position in the parliament. If it were, we would see some of the racist anti-Semitic groups that currently stand for office also saying that they deserve a seat at the table. The Greeks had it right when they warned that the system of tyranny is only as good as the worst man who can become a tyrant.

I have heard it said that parties like the Greens have relied on the current system to build our support, but I have to tell you that that fundamentally misunderstands the history of the Australian Greens. We are the political arm of a people-powered grassroots movement. I can tell you about my own story in the state of Victoria. When I joined in the year 2000, we had one member of local government. Through a lot of hard work, through branch meetings, through trivia nights, through a hell of a lot of elbow grease, that support built slowly over time. More people were elected to local government. Finally, there was a breakthrough into the state parliament and then, in 2010, our first Victorian senator was elected with a quota in their own right. That is the legitimate pathway to political success. There are not any shortcuts here.

How is it that after 12 public hearings over a year and a half by the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters and an outcome that produced a unanimous report, supported by all of the major parties here, we are now seeing the Labor Party oppose those reforms? We know that people like Alan Griffin, who actually co-authored Labor's internal post-election review, and people like Gary Gray, who was the party spokesperson on electoral matters, support these changes. We know that many other Labor MPs support these changes. I will not quote them at length. So the question is: what has changed here?

The factional powerbrokers have flexed their muscle. That is what has happened. The same people who were responsible for toppling a couple of prime ministers and for scuttling a whole range of really important progressive policies have decided that they do not want this Senate taking away their power and influence, because it is through these backroom preference deals that these people really shine. They wield their power and influence as a result of the current system, and they are fighting hard to keep it. The sad reality is that it is these people who now control the Labor Party. You know the type: the sort of person who gets rid of a sitting Prime Minister and cannot wait to go on TV to re-enact their role in it. They are the brains trust who have decided that they can convince people that, because the Greens are supporting a policy that we have advocated for over a decade, somehow we are in bed with the government—because we are supporting our own policy! You have to ask yourself: who thought of that great planning?

The Labor Party, a party that has voted with the coalition a third of the time, is having a go at the Greens for voting with the coalition six per cent of the time. It wants to say that we are too close to the government—

Senator Dastyari interjecting—