Doug Cameron (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

I just want to go back to an issue that Senator Wong raised in relation to this voting below the line. This was an analysis that was done by Ross Gittins. The article I have was reported in The Canberra Times on 29 February. What Mr Gittins is saying in relation to this issue—and I did mention this myself in a contribution I made earlier—is that if this bill were passed it would make life a lot easier for lobbyists. They would have a much smaller list of Senate parties to get around—in both senses, he argues. He says:

Another fear about Turnbull’s voting change – being supported by the Greens and Nick Xenophon, but opposed by everyone else in the Senate – is that it will lead to a decline in political competition by raising the barriers to entry by other, newly emerging parties.

I think it is clear that the purpose of this bill is to consolidate those who are here in this Senate and to ensure that no other emerging parties could challenge the Greens in relation to the position they have at the moment. They have basically made sure that no other progressive parties would ever have a chance of getting into the Senate.

But Ross Gittins goes on to say:

The Nobel prize-winning economist Kenneth Arrow, first came to prominence with his ‘‘impossibility theorem’’.

He proved mathematically that when voters have to choose between three or more options, no system of ranking their preferences can produce a single, indisputably best order of precedence.

That is, there’s plenty of room for argument over which voting system, while not being perfect, is better than the others.

In relation to this mathematically proved theory—that, if you have to choose between three or more options, no system of ranking the preferences can produce a single, indisputably best order of precedence—there have been questions asked about how we came to move from the current system to one where you mark six boxes on the top line and 12 on the bottom line. Minister, have you actually looked at this Kenneth Arrow theorem? When you came to the view around the numbers that voters would put in both above-the-line and below-the-line voting, was there any discussion about this? Was there any advice given on this? How did you come to the conclusion that what you were putting was the best way forward?