Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition will also not be supporting this amendment. As a threshold issue, we do not believe the Voice should be enshrined in the Constitution, and there is no amendment to this bill, the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice) 2023, which can clear that threshold. Supporting this amendment to the bill would require us to support the idea that the Voice should be in the Constitution and also that the Constitution should then be amended in the manner proposed by Senator Thorpe.

We also have very significant procedural concerns about this amendment. Our criticisms of the government's process to date are a matter of public record. The Constitution alteration introduced by the government was developed behind closed doors by the handpicked referendum working group, without the benefit of a constitutional convention. It was the subject of a joint select committee inquiry that was given less than 4½ days to inquire into the impacts of a significant change to our system of government. It has been the subject of now four Solicitor-General opinions, three of which have been kept secret and the fourth of which, as we know from Senate estimates, was drafted expressly for the purposes of being made public and therefore is best understood as a very carefully curated public showpiece rather than a thorough unvarnished exposition of the risks.

This amendment does not even meet those very low standards. We are not aware of any public process that has led to the development of this amendment. It is not one of the many options considered over the course of co-design work and committee inquiry. It has not been the subject of extensive legal and academic debate, and to the best of our knowledge it has not been the subject of any inquiry at all. We don't know whether it's even been the subject of legal advice, secret or otherwise.

The risks associated with this proposed change to our Constitution are not just unquantifiable. The risks may in fact not even have been identified. We don't even know what the risks are, let alone how severe they may be. And, regardless of the content, there are no circumstances in which we could support this constitutional amendment.