Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make my contribution to this debate on the Commonwealth Electoral Amendment Bill 2016 about Senate voting reform. It is worth noting that a fair bit has been said so far in this debate by some, but I think that a lot more information needs to be sought and more contributions need to be made in this space.

I note that we have a very interesting Senate. We have a Senate with a diverse range of parties and a diverse range of views. I am not a historian of the Senate but I would find it hard to believe there have been many Senates with as diverse a range of views as we have with the myriad parties we have today. I note that by bringing together people from different parties and with different views we are able to share views and evolve as a group. Yesterday morning, Senator Day, who is in the chamber, was at the doors of parliament holding a press conference with other crossbench senators. Senator Day said: 'As an individual I am a nobody.' I do not believe he is a nobody but he was making the point that as an individual he is a nobody but, when they all come together, they are a powerful voice. I thought: if having this debate about Senate voting reform can show Senator Day the bright light of collectivism and the importance of collectivism, then perhaps it has achieved one thing. To hear Senator Day talk about collectivism in a way that would make Senator Rhiannon proud was a sight to behold.

There are very different views in this place and many different political views have been expressed. The reality is this: my views and those of a senator like Senator Day are polar opposites on many contentious issues. On the basics, we all love this nation. We all love Australia, we all want a better Australia, and we fundamentally share core values about what it means to be Australian and what we want to achieve. But as to how that is achieved, there are different views. Someone like Senator Day will come at it from a much more conservative framework than I will. And that is fine. That is healthy. That is a good part of this debate. The reality is that a Senate that is made up of just a few major parties results in a situation where a diversity of views can be lost.

Senator Leyonhjelm is an out-and-out libertarian, and he has come to this place and expressed those views. I did not believe that I shared many of those views but, in working with him on the 'nanny state' inquiry and seeing some of the information he presented, he has convinced me that there are many instances where perhaps regulation it not always the answer. We have Senator Lambie, with her life experience and her passion and drive. Amongst the many issues she talks about are veterans issues and issues to do with Tasmania. Again, we are better off as a Senate for having this diversity of views.

What has actually happened—let us not pussyfoot around this—is that we have a government that is unhappy with the make-up of the Senate and unhappy with what they feel was obstructionist action. There are two points to make on that. Firstly, it was not obstructionist. The data shows it was not. Secondly, some people simply do not agree with your legislation, but perhaps if you had better legislation you would not have the same electoral problems and problems passing it through the Senate. It is not as if the Senate is rejecting proposals that are immensely popular out there in the community. Hundred thousand dollar degrees are not wanted by our community. The reforms that were being pushed, especially in the 2014 budget around healthcare costs, were not causes that were supported by the community.

We have a government that has a Senate that they do not agree with, that they do not support, and they have retrofitted an electoral process to get a desired outcome. Let us not kid ourselves. The most likely outcome at the end of this will be a Senate that will have conservatives represented by the Liberal-National Party and there will be the Labor Party, the Greens and perhaps very occasionally another senator representing a minor party. That is not, I believe, a good outcome. The reality is that minor party senators tend to be elected on smaller votes when they are first elected, and then they are given an opportunity to prove themselves. If they are able to prove themselves, they are able to use that profile to build on that vote. To phrase it a different way, it really is a sink-or-swim kind of situation. What we have here is a model that has been designed to defeat that.

We see the desperation of the government to get this legislation passed. Yesterday we had a situation where Senator Muir—another senator who comes from very different experiences into this place—tried to move to consider the government's own ABCC legislation. This was the government's own bill. The government voted that down and it was not even brought on. Then Senator Leyonhjelm tried to move to bring on the Greens' own same-sex marriage bill. I will be corrected if I am wrong, but I believe that was in the name of Senator Hanson-Young. That was voted down by the Greens. Finally, Senator Lazarus tried to bring on the coal seam gas landowner rights amendment, which I believe was also in the name of the Greens. That was voted down.

The government has a view that says that this electoral reform is such a priority, it is a greater priority than actually having a debate about ABCC—which the government itself has prioritised. The government has been out there saying, 'The next election, this election, ABCC, this, that'. You have got government ministers walking the halls of level 2, the press gallery, openly briefing that there will be a double-D election on 2 July or maybe even the ninth, and the issue of the election is going to be the ABCC legislation. Yet they are afraid. They refuse to bring it here. They vote against bringing it here.

There is a whole separate question—and there will be others who will comment on this—about those actions yesterday in relation to the time management motion that led to this bill being debated today and what impact they will have on a potential trigger for a double-D election. I think there is a situation being created here where it is highly likely a lot of this will end up being contested in the High Court, if the government goes down the path it has been openly saying to journalists it intends to go down. We will wait to see. Fortunately, with this government, one thing we can count on is that what it says it is going to do and what it does tend to be very different from time to time, as I am sure you are aware, Mr Acting Deputy President Bernardi.

But a diverse Senate, a different Senate, a Senate with minority views, a Senate with minority senators, is a better place, a better chamber. The political logic behind the government's actions is clear. The government want to remove what they see as a pesky and unfriendly backbench—sorry; crossbench. They certainly want to remove their backbench, but that is a matter for another day! They want to remove the crossbench and they have politically engineered a system that allows them to do it.

On top of that, the behaviour of the Greens in all of this has really been quite appalling. I note the leader of the Greens party, Senator Richard Di Natale, had a few words to say yesterday about me. I will certainly be taking the opportunity to respond in kind as we go through this morning, and I think there will be plenty of opportunity over the next couple of days. But this is a fallacy of an argument, a fallacy of a point. This is a political fix clouded in the rhetoric of democracy and choice. That is not what this is about. This is about a desperate Greens political party and political leader trying to solidify their own political position.

Let us be clear what the demographers, mathematicians, sociologists and others will say is the outcome of this. In the long term it will mean that a party with a vote like the Greens will be getting will solidify their electoral position. In the short term it will probably mean, based on previous results—again, if you are going to apply previous results—that certainly one of the Greens' South Australian senators, perhaps one of their Western Australian senators and perhaps one of the Victorian senators will not be re-elected. That is a matter for them. But the concern here is this—

Senator Bilyk interjecting—

It is a harsh way to be removing your own senators, but politics is a tough business. There is a brutality in it. But the idea that says that a party that really benefited from a system that allowed them to grow, that allowed them to attract party support and like-minded party support and consolidate a further Left vote to be able to become a major party would then try and shut the door behind them and stop other political parties from being able to experience that kind of growth and that kind of opportunity I think is appalling. There is an argument that says, 'These crossbench senators were all elected on a very, very small vote, so that makes them unrepresentative.' Let us be clear. There is a quarter of the population that did not vote for one of the larger political parties and voted for smaller parties, and they are being represented in the Senate. There is a group of people who have a broad position which is, 'None of the major parties, thanks,' and that vote is represented by the diversity of the different parties that end up being elected in this place.

The past week has been an incredibly telling one, as we have seen where this relationship between the Greens and the government is really heading. Let us not kid ourselves. The leader of the Greens party, Senator Di Natale, has made a conscious decision that he wants to take the Greens political party to the right. We have seen a kind of dance that has gone on between the government and the Greens over the past two months. Mr Acting Deputy President Bernardi, I believe you may be familiar with the slippery-slope argument, which other people have used in this chamber before—that you perhaps start off with voting together on tax transparency laws and, before you know it, you are voting together on Senate voting reform, and who knows where these kinds of situations end up? When you head down that slippery slope, Mr Acting Deputy President Bernardi, you can end up anywhere, as I am sure you are well aware. And that is what worries me. This is a slippery slope. If it keeps going, politics in this country is going to keep getting dragged down to the right.