Alex Gallacher (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will take that interjection. It might mean that the country goes for a number of weeks or months without a decision being made. It is rushed. The AEC has indicated that there is a problem.

The bill may potentially exhaust 3,000 votes. Twenty-five per cent who do not vote for the major parties may not see their vote carried out in the way it has been up until now. You can debate whether that is a good thing or a bad thing, but basically I am always very reluctant to change rules. I have found through my working life that people who wrote rules sometimes 100 years ago were very, very good at it, and when we ever changed a rule there were always unintended consequences or unthought-of consequences. So I am a person who thinks, 'If you've got a system, make it work.' I do not really think that the system is broken. I do not think it is broken.

What clearly is broken for major political parties is that we do not attract the majority of the vote anymore. There are up to three million people voting the other way in the Senate. You could argue that that is a good thing. This is supposed to be the house of review. This is supposed to be where legislation is tested, where people actually evaluate what is coming up from the House of Representatives and have a good look at it through the Senate committee system. There is ample evidence of that being a good and proper system for Australia.

I think the average elector actually gets it. They obviously get it because they can vote one way in the lower house and another way in the upper house. They can distinguish their votes. So maybe this Senate that people are castigating is what the Australian people actually want. I accept that there might be a majority of Liberal voters and/or Labor voters who think they have a problem with that, but, when you look at the 100 per cent of people who vote, this is what we have got.

We will have that changed by a grab for power from 'the black Wiggle' and his crew. That is basically what it appears to be: a very pragmatic, driven, outcome focused, Greens leader whose major challenge will be to take his party with him. That is where I would say that he may have the most difficulty. He will not have the difficulty in this chamber. Senator Simms I think is here without even getting a vote. I do not think he has actually got a vote from an elector yet. He may well in a double-D. He may well, in a double-D, have a very short career. I do not wish that on him. I do not wish that on anybody, however they get here. He replaced a very good retiring senator in Penny Wright, a great contributor here. He replaced Senator Wright, so he is fully entitled to be here. But it will be interesting to see how this deal that has been done plays out in South Australia. It will be very interesting to see how this plays out in South Australia.

I will continue on the theme of the change in the Greens. I have not been here long. I knew Bob Brown. I respected his contribution to the chamber. I did not often agree with him, but I thought he was a very, very effective parliamentary performer. I happen to have a story to recount about the leadership of the Greens in this whole matter. A member of parliament attended a conference in Geneva, and he attended the conference with Senator Brown. Within hours of Senator Brown landing in Geneva, he had a crowd of 500 people, an enormous number of media, in attendance, and that person said, 'I knew I was in the presence of a world-class environmental leader.' That was his reputation. When he came into this chamber, he carried that gravitas. We did not always agree. We almost never agreed on a lot of issues but you never doubted the absolute integrity of his beliefs and his commitment to the Greens ideology.

When he left, Senator Milne carried that on. She carried that on, I think, in an exemplary manner. I remember a contribution she made here one morning—and she could be quite aggressive and quite combative in her stance—when she tore strips off Senator Abetz's threat to keep us here over the weekend. She was a very able and committed performer and someone who engendered a lot of respect in this chamber.

With what has happened now, I do not see that respect continuing forward with Senator Di Natale's position. He has now left that clean-driven green ideology and he is now playing with everybody—on his personal position, his party's position and the power they can bring to bear. That is fine, but it is a change. They have always been as pure as the driven snow. They always wanted to be environmentally clean and correct and right. They never actually wanted to get in and exercise real power. That is a change.

The Greens have changed. This week is the week the Greens have changed to actually play the game and not be pure and ideologically driven. They are going to be here to play. And, once you make a deal—as you well know from your business career, Mr Acting Deputy President Edwards, and as I know from my union career—it is addictive. Once you make a good deal, it is doubly addictive.

So they made a deal today, or they will make a deal at the end of this week, and it will be addictive. That surge of power they get, that little bit more media they get, that little bit more esteem they get—and maybe another GQ, maybe another poloneck bloody photoshoot, whatever it takes to get—