David Leyonhjelm (NSW, Liberal Democratic Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a sad note on which to end a rather difficult couple of days. I described this as a dirty little deal when I first heard about it a couple of weeks ago and it has not got any cleaner in that time. This dirty little deal between the Greens and the Liberals could just as easily be called the 'Rhiannon re-election bill' or perhaps the 'Get rid of annoying small parties bill'. In the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters we saw, right from the beginning, that there was no representation of minor parties and no representation of the Independents. Only Nick Xenophon was on the committee. It was a fix-up right from the start and it was a fix-up at the end. The hearing was a charade; the hypocrisy was rampant.

Speaking of hypocrisy, the Greens—in the process of giving their support for this bill to the government—abandoned their commitment to 'every vote, every time' on same-sex marriage, voted for the gag over and over again and, of course, abandoned their interest in changes to political donations. From the government's point of view, I honestly do not understand why they have pursued this. It will not improve the Senate. It will not overcome the fact that the Senate is a logjam at times. It actually was not a logjam with the crossbench but it will be under these rules. It will not wipe out the crossbench, but there will be fewer of them. It will make it a lot less democratic. There will be fewer crossbench senators, and small parties starting off will find it incredibly difficult, unless they happen to have multimillionaire backers who fund their campaign.

Nobody pretends that the old election rules, as they were until now, were perfect. The crossbench never said they were. The crossbench never defended them. In fact, we had agreed on what we thought were perfectly reasonable remedies, but our voices were swamped in this dirty little deal. It is no improvement.