David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Minister, if you want to get a resolution by negotiation, you need to talk to people, and that's what this government has refused to do time after time—and that includes on urgent and necessary reform to the electoral process, just as it included on appropriate amendments to the NACC legislation. Your government negotiated with the coalition amendments to the NACC legislation to shut down public hearings and to put in place this artificial test of exceptional circumstances that this amendment by Senator David Pocock is trying to address. Do you not now acknowledge that, with public confidence in the NACC falling, with open questions about the decision not to investigate the robodebt scandal and having all that done behind closed doors with no public hearings, it was wrong to shackle the NACC and put in such an artificially high test for transparency and daylight?