Ricky Muir (Victoria, Australian Motoring Enthusiast Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have tried to get answers on a very contentious issue, but it seems the minister has lost his voice or something! So I will make a bit of a contribution on this amendment. I have not got an answer at all, and I do not think the people of Australia will until this bill goes through; then they will realise what has actually happened. I believe this amendment is a sham amendment to a sham committee process, a committee process that took—

A government senator: 2½ years.

No, it did not take 2½ years. You discussed the 2013 election and then you brought a bill forward. That is two different processes. You discussed the bill for four hours after taking submissions right up until the evening beforehand, and then you got a committee report out on the evening of the day the committee hearing happened.

A government senator interjecting—

I was at the hearings. I was actually at the hearings. Yes, I contributed to that. I got to see how much of a sham process this really was. I was not just sitting over the other side of the chamber, trying to make a little bit of noise over it!

I believe that this amendment—and I have read the amendment, Minister Cormann; it is in my hand—fixes an intentional flaw introduced into the bill. I believe that the below-the-line voting process was deliberately left out to make it look like, 'Oh, look, we've found a problem in this sham committee process and we're going to fix it.' Most of Australia can see through that; they really can. The journalists up in the press gallery pick up on this. I believe it has been done to give the impression that the process was actually a democratic one, but it really was not. When we have a party to the left of me here who love to scream about democracy, this is absolutely shocking.

However, having said that, I am somewhat supportive of this amendment, only because the seemingly deliberate flaws need to be fixed.

An opposition senator interjecting—

There are. There are so many of them. This amendment, I suppose, needs to go through, but it was set up so that that would be the case. It does not really consider the difference in the number of seats that are up for election in a double dissolution. That is something that needs to be addressed further. It is not in this amendment. Funny, that! It has not been thought through properly: the process is a sham. It assumes that each above-the-line box is worth only two votes below the line but, based on the last election, that number should be closer to 2.5. I actually have amendments that will address that, but it is oh so clear that there is no room for any amendments. There is a deal that has been done, and nobody is budging. That is going to come at the expense of the people that you are supposed to represent.

In my amendments, I would also allow the differences between a half and full Senate election, which, again, this amendment seems to have missed. Perhaps if there had been an actual consultation period, a proper consultation period, on the bill, like most other bills have—an involved, successful committee process—these issues could have been addressed. We would not be here at 4.30 in the morning on a Friday. This process had to happen because it has pointed out a whole heap of issues in a debate that the minister did not even want to participate in. Perhaps if this had not been rushed for a political outcome, then these changes, which we will likely be stuck with for the next 30 years, would have been thought through correctly. I feel that in this debate we have highlighted a fundamental flaw in the bill, probably likely to be deliberate, where it will not be an offence to hand out misleading how-to-vote cards as a vote for a major party is not informal, but it would exhaust the vote for one in four voters. This whole process is a sham.