Penny Wong (SA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

No—essentially, his argument applies equally to a first-past-the-post system. I think the Senate has served the nation well in being a house which has a compulsory preferential system and where we get a range of different views. I think it is undeniable that these changes make it almost impossible for there to be any new entrants. Regardless of what my views might be about some new entrants or some Independents, I do not think that is necessarily a good thing for democracy.

I want to come back to Senator Cormann because he did not answer my question. I asked him about advertising. I asked him about advertising, and he waved me away. The advertising, of course—to you, Chair—is the education campaign about the largest changes in 30 years. I think it is a legitimate question. I know Senator Rhiannon and the Greens suddenly do not think it is an important thing to educate voters, but we think it is important. I asked some questions about that education campaign. I was dismissed with: 'First, we don't know when this will be passed.' I said, 'Okay, why don't we leave that, shall we, and say how many weeks after royal assent?' 'Second,' he said, 'they're an independent statutory agency,' and then some diatribe.

I again would point this out: the government have spent millions and millions of dollars on advertising. They seem to be very happy to spend $37 million promoting the Intergenerational reportno legislation there. They spent a great deal of money talking about the Competition Policy Review, including printing copies of the report and promotional banners.

They have wasted a couple of million dollars on the dumped tax white paper—hasn't that been fantastic? That has been a great process, hasn't it! 'We're going to have a green paper. We're going to have a white paper. I don't know if we're going to have any paper. Actually, we don't know if we've got any tax policy at all, so we haven't got anything to advertise because we actually don't know what we're doing.' Anyway, it was $2 million on the tax white paper that this minister told us in Senate estimates was definitely happening. It was going to happen, and all of a sudden it has been airbrushed out.

And then, as I said, in addition to this I do not recall them waiting for university reforms to be passed before we all were subjected to those advertisements. I do not recall the China FTA coming into force before they decided that every Australian over 18, which just happens to be the same number of people who vote, would be subjected to advertising about the benefits of the fair trade agreement.

You are pretty happy to throw around taxpayers' money when it comes to a whole range of political advertising. I think you should be up front with the Senate about how you are going to ensure that Australians understand the changes that are being imposed on them through this system and how you will ensure that people do have the choice. The thing I was observing when Senator Cormann was saying, 'People have the choice; people have the choice'—and I appreciate that this is a fundamental philosophical difference between Labor and the Liberal Party—is that they think individual choice is the answer to everything. If you are poor, you can pull yourself up by your bootstraps. You just work hard enough. You can just choose. You can just choose to get a job or not to get a job et cetera.

We know people vote informal for many reasons, literacy amongst them. We know that 96 or 97 per cent of people vote above the line and have done so for the last three decades. Now to simply say, 'They can just choose,' and fail to understand that voter habit therefore has an effect how this system operates I think is really an ideological position rather than a practical position. I would ask the minister: how are you going to actually ensure that people understand what the largest changes in voting in three decades mean?