Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

With the luxury of a brief additional period of time, I'll put the Greens' position on the record in relation to this amendment. We support participatory democracy. Politics can't work for people without listening to their voices rather than the voices of big donors and corporations. However, the proposal from One Nation sets the threshold for triggering a big and expensive review of our constitutional framework at just two per cent of voters in the majority of states. That is a big change, and we think it needs more consideration, particularly about what an appropriate threshold will be. We will not be supporting the amendments, but we will continue to call for reforms that increase democratic participation and give politics back to the people. This could include a range of things such as citizen juries, reforming question time, mechanisms to allow the public to petition for a key issue to be debated in parliament, a range of reforms to get big money out of politics and ensuring that the maximum number of people get to vote in elections and referenda, something that our amendments, which, sadly, were not supported by this chamber, sought to achieve.