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

Again, with all due respect, Senator Watt, the Voice can't work if it does not have any knowledge of the things it is meant to advise on. That is a very basic fact. The constitutional right is to make representations. If I don't know what I'm making representations on, then the Voice itself can't work. So the answer to the question is actually very clear. The Voice can't work if it doesn't know about the things it is meant to advise on.

Therefore, in order for the Voice to work, one thing the High Court could do is imply a reciprocal constitutional obligation to give the Voice notice of a proposed decision or a policy. That is the risk you are asking the Australian people to vote on. You are giving them a constitutional right to make representations, but you are making light of the fact that there will be other implied constitutional rights that a High Court will find that they have. For the life of me, I cannot work out how the Voice itself can work if it does not have knowledge of the things it is meant to advise on. That is something that I am asked by people regularly. I have now no answer to them. What is the answer to how the Voice can work if the government does not provide them with information in relation to the decisions that it is making?

You also made comment about the weight of legal opinion. In relation to the weight of legal opinion: that is a contested position, and you know that. Some have one view and some have another view. It is a contested position. What it means is that you are asking Australians to take a risk with their Constitution. You're asking them to take a risk with their Constitution, with their rule book. But what you're forgetting to tell them is that the risk they are taking is a permanently embedded risk. And you are not able to articulate to me or to the Senate how the Voice makes representations in relation to policy development if it doesn't know that a policy is being developed. In other words, there is an implied constitutional duty to consult. What does an implied constitutional duty to consult mean? It means the government will need to give notice and provide information to the Voice.

In your comments you also referred to the legal advice provided by the Solicitor-General. What you forgot to say, though, was that that was the legal advice that the Attorney-General's Department at estimates openly admitted was prepared for public consumption. That was always prepared for public consumption. There are three other legal advices. We knew of two of them. At the recent Senate estimates, we discovered, lo and behold, the government have not been up-front about the legal advices—they had us all thinking there was three. Well, guess what, we actually found out there is now four legal advices: one for public consumption and three other legal advices.

If the government is so sure of its legal position, why will the government not release these legal advices to the public? So again I ask you: in relation to the implied constitutional duty to consult—in other words, by giving notice and providing information—how does the Voice make a representation in relation to policy development if it doesn't know a policy is being developed? This is a very serious question. The Voice has a right to make representations. What are the implied rights that flow from that?