Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Probably it would have been. No, he was at work at the sawmill. It would have been 10 then. He was probably having a beer in my office. The reality is he represents a person who has a basic education in Australia, who legally secured a position in this Senate and who arrived with a skill set that he identified was not a perfect match for here—but this is a country that believes in people participating in democracy. That is what I thought it was—that we would make space for everybody to be here and that if you could get here you would be accepted and you would be able to participate. But instead what we have seen is it has hit a point where the government have been so arrogant, so rude and so insulting to the crossbench from the very beginning that they cannot govern in the way that they want. So they have cooked up this deal with the Greens to get rid of the problem, because everybody in the parliament should be like them. They come in here with this veneer of civility, education and entitlement that they belong here—that is what the Greens have signed up with. They are absolute advocates for themselves and absolute excluders of diversity in the most arrogant and shameful way, to put on the record, in so many ways they think the crossbench are beneath the role of this Senate.

I do not agree with them. I accept the fact the Australian people sent the people here that we have here and I accept—despite their too often voting with the government in my view—their right to be here and their contribution to this place. That has never been forthcoming from the government. That is why they are delighted that they finally got the Greens, who also have that air of ascendancy and sense of entitlement. I think in his comments Senator Carr was quoting an article called 'Political flirting is a tricky game,' in which the writer of that piece described the Greens as purists. They are purists in a different way. But the two purists have got together to get rid of the riffraff. That is what is going on here—the arrogance that comes with that. That is what they are saying.

What we are seeing with this piece of legislation is not reform; rather we are seeing a purge. We are seeing a smugness that will see the exclusion of a variety of voices. We will see fewer Independents, we will see fewer small parties and we will probably see no new parties because of what the government, in their deal with the Greens, have been able to stitch up. The sort of dirty deals that we are seeing daily with the Greens were probably an indication that they were going to go this far all the time—although I continue to be surprised that they actually have done that.

Under his leadership the Greens are growing ever closer to the conservatives on the other side of the chamber, because we look at the deals that have been done. The first deal that Senator Di Natale did with the Abbott-Turnbull government was to cut the pensions of part-pensioners. That is what the Greens party voted for in their warm-up to this grand finale that they are trying to enact here. Then we had Senator Di Natale's dirty deal with the Abbott-Turnbull government to water down the tax transparency laws for multinational companies. Labor and the Independents were ready to make sure that the whole lot of multinational companies—we had the votes—had to show Australia what they were going to get. The reality is that they absolutely sold out the people of Australia and agreed with the Liberal-National government to provide an absence of scrutiny of tax transparency laws.

The next deal we had was the filthy deal to alter the laws that govern the election of senators, and that is what we are debating here tonight—clearly increasing the chances of the coalition to gain a majority of the Senate. In this desperate ploy to deal himself into the centre of political relevance in his own mind, this deal by Senator Di Natale with the Greens has sold out all of their political values.

Senator Ludwig, in his contribution to this debate, indicated—I usually rely on his ear on the ground—that he has heard in respect of this legislation that there are more than eight amendments that will need to be moved by the government itself because the bill is so flawed due to the government rushing it through the committee and this place. That is why the scale of what is happening is enormous, the impact is devastating and we should resist this at every turn.