I rise today to add my voice to those in this section of the House, the crossbench, in support of the member for Curtin’s call for an inquiry into this piece of legislation—a referral of it to the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Matters. We’re talking about legislation. We’re not talking about report that was tabled. We’re not talking about some vague set of principles and ideas. We’re talking about laws, and the parliament that I love is the parliament that uses all its tools to interrogate laws that will be sitting on the statute books for a long time.

The community that brought me to this parliament brought me here with a very clear mandate to ask for greater scrutiny, to shine a light into dark corners, to turn up the torch and, indeed, to turn up the heat when I see something that isn’t right. And when I look at this legislation, that’s what I see—and so far it has only been a look. As my colleagues have said, no exposure draft was circulated to the broader parliament. There was no opportunity to look at the detail on this legislation. It seems that the only opportunity that was given to interrogate this legislation was a cosy interrogation that happened behind the closed doors of goodness knows where between the government and the opposition.

Any person out in broader Australia who is listening to this debate can smell a rat. I certainly can. There are good elements to this bill—elements that I’ve called for, for a long time: lowering the disclosure threshold—good idea; I’ve been doing it since I was elected, and it’s not that hard. The major parties, though, of course need to have significant investment of public funds in order to do that—on every seat, it seems, even though most funds go into a general pool. In such a piece of legislation, the details are thick—so thick that we don’t want to investigate them or interrogate them through an inquiry.

I think when you look at this bill you ask, ‘Well, what does the label on the can say?’ The label on the can says ‘electoral reform’. Who could argue with that? We need it; clearly we do. We need big money to be taken out of politics; we absolutely do. We need transparency and real-time exposure of who is donating to whom and influencing policies and politicians; we do. We need a diverse parliament. How many times have I seen members of this place stand up and beat their chest about having representation from all kinds of people? But the details of this legislation, the bits the government doesn’t want you to see, are really designed to make sure we can’t flip a seat from an incumbent.

When it comes to self-interest, this legislation is not going to affect many of us, myself included, because I am an incumbent and I have all the advantages that go with that. But I don’t want to win a race that I have all the advantages in. That doesn’t bring me a sense of having been the best competitor. This is not about levelling the playing field. This is about making the mountain more difficult to climb for anyone who dares to say that the major parties don’t have all the answers.

This was an opportunity for this government to be statespeople, an opportunity to show the Australian public what integrity is all about, what courage is all about, by saying: ‘Do you know what? The Australian people have lost so much faith in their democracy and we’re going to help to restore it. But when it comes to the scrutiny, well, we’re not going to allow that, actually. We’re not going to circulate an exposure draft for the whole parliament to see. No: we’re going to introduce a bill into the House of Representatives. We’re going to drop it on a Friday. Maybe some of the Independents will get their hands on it on the weekend and then cause a bit of a fuss on a Monday’—and here we are, doing that; I’m glad that we have fulfilled that destiny—’and then we’re going to ram it through the House as quickly as we can.’

Won’t it be fascinating to see who’s on the speaking list when we have this debate? How many members of the coalition will stand up and call for greater scrutiny? How many members of the government will stand up and look to the detail, look to those pages of exclusions when it comes to the definition of a gift? I’ll be very curious to see who’s on the speaking list, actually.

Just imagine, as one of my colleagues, the member for Goldstein, said, if we saw the two major parties walking into this chamber in a spirit of collaboration on some of the big existential questions this parliament faces. Just imagine: they’ve gone away together on a little camp, perhaps, and come together into the parliament with strong evidence based, scientifically backed policy on climate change and are saying, ‘Australia, this is what we’re going to do, and we’re going to do it together.’ Just imagine that. We’d all be here cheering. But no, we’re not doing that.

This is one of those moments, really—if a person was a bit cynical; I don’t know why they would be out there in constituency land!—that feels like a Deirdre Chambers ‘what a coincidence’ moment: we’re in the chamber today with the two major parties coming together with this wonderful gift for democracy that’s called electoral reform.

So, I fully support this legislation going to the Joint Select Committee on Electoral Matters. If it is as good as the minister has told us it is, and he’s really confident, then he won’t be afraid of scrutiny. He’ll be welcoming it. He’ll be using every parliamentary tool there is because there’s no rush on this, is there? No rush whatsoever! The only rush is to get truth in political advertising, and we’re not going near that. The only rush is to get real-time political donation transparency—no rush on that either, it seems. But there’s a big rush on making sure that we lock this in before the potential for perhaps a different make-up in the chamber, come the outcome of the next election, when it may not be so easy to do a cosy deal.

I will pause here and allow others to speak. My central contention here right now is that, if this bill is as good as the government says, then let’s not just leave it to trust; let’s leave it to scrutiny, which is what a parliament’s all about.