Page 4635 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 19 October 2011
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Council of Australia, the Law Society of the Northern Territory, the Canberra Business Council, the Northern Territory government and the parliamentary committee for legal and constitutional affairs.
During that inquiry the point was made that there are other matters in the self-government act that also need to be addressed, and that is certainly true. I understand that we are the only parliament that cannot set its own size. This is a matter, amongst others, which should be the subject of ongoing dialogue with the federal government, and the motion appropriately reflects this.
I did have a look at the Hansard of the commonwealth debate just to try to understand why the Liberals objected to this bill. There are really no substantive reasons, but there was one particularly interesting reason given by Senator Brandis. Senator Brandis said:
There is another reason why the coalition opposes this legislation. We look with a very sceptical eye on anything that comes from Senator Bob Brown and the Greens.
This reminded me of a comment by Mrs Dunne when she said:
The reason I say that if Andrew Barr supports this we should be very afraid is quite simply that.
It really does raise a different issue about the Canberra Liberals. Perhaps this is the first consistent policy from the Canberra Liberals, to oppose anything based solely on who the proponent is without even bothering to properly consider the merits of the issue.
There were a few other gems in the Brandis speech. Most importantly, there was his conclusion that the Liberal Party would not be supporting the bill because it would lead to gay marriage. Apart from being discriminatory and bigoted, this is of course a very ignorant argument, particularly from someone who is a senior counsel.
Without going through the detail of it, I think most of us understand the rules covering the interaction between inconsistent territory and commonwealth laws and the covering-the-field principle where the commonwealth has intended to exhaustively cover a particular issue to the exclusion of all other legislation. It was particularly curious that Senator Brandis would put this as his primary argument for opposition to the bill as he, in the Senate committee hearings, argued the very opposite, that the states and territories had no capacity to legislate in this regard because of the commonwealth Marriage Act.
I will turn to the argument that we should not pass this because we need a more comprehensive review. There is absolutely no reason why we cannot do both. I invite proponents of that argument to tell me why it is that we cannot do both. The reality is that there is no reason at all.
The argument that Senator Humphries tried to advance as to why this is not a good idea was his mistaken view that the proponent is a hypocrite. In fact, in his own
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