Jacinta Collins (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Cabinet Secretary) Share this | Hansard source

The opposition will not support Senator Rhiannon and the Greens' cynical amendments. We have already covered the inadequacy of them to meet the purported purpose but also there are other problems such as questionable will legal effect. In that respect, I am surprised that the government is actually supporting these amendments. So let's run through those issues. The amendments purport to provide the new voting system established under this legislation can only apply to elections held after 1 July 2016. This appears to contradict the commencement provisions at clause 2 of the bill, which provides that the provisions of the bill commence the day after royal assent. I cannot recall seeing such an internal contradiction in relation to commencement in a bill such as this in the past. Internal inconsistency in legislation was one of the cardinal sins of legislation but then we have already just seen that set Senator Rhiannon even needs to be reminded to move her amendments, reinforcing the procedural points that I made earlier here. She does not know which amendment we are on: She does not know what the fix is. She has got these cynical amendments that she cannot justify. As I indicated, there is what at least appears to be—and maybe the government can advise me differently from advice they have themselves received—an internal inconsistency. But as we have seen throughout this process, Senator Rhiannon is not interested in the detail. All she is interested in is saving her own political skin. All Senator Rhiannon is interested in is engineering a double dissolution election, which she sees as her main hope to being returned to the Senate.

I need to remind the Senate are Senator Rhiannon's credibility because even apart from her competence, the credibility issues that have not been part of the debate here in recent times, I think, need to be remembered. Senator Rhiannon was so furious that her party had defied her edict regarding accepting corporate donations that she penned a letter, a poison letter, attacking her own party for taking a $1.7 million donation, a record-breaking corporate donation, from wotif and published it under a fake name. She had to face up to that. How she continues through the huge gap in her credibility as a result of that is astounding.