Page 413 - Week 02 - Tuesday, 19 February 2019
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I could go on; this is fun. Just because someone believes in one or many gods does not mean gay kids should get bullied. I probably should stop there before this gets out of hand. Madam Speaker, there is a point to this, I promise. When we are making laws, when we are making policy, when we are proposing motions, we should always start from the point of their being constitutional, evidence based and human rights compliant.
Those are, of course, very different things. I will quickly go to each of them—firstly, their being constitutional. The accusation that one thing or another is unconstitutional is shouted almost as often in this country as it is in the United States, often with less accuracy. Whilst I do not claim to be an expert, I also note how horribly wrong it went for everyone who did claim to be an expert in the section 44 debacle. Congratulations again go to Mr Barr for leading the only strong, stable government in Canberra these last few years.
As well as enjoying the circus act across the lake, the other times I have heard the constitution come up recently have been in this place, in the case of the jobs code. On the jobs code, some Liberals argued that the ACT government should not be allowed to take care of workers, because it is the vibe; it is the constitution; it is the vibe—or something like that. After we passed the jobs code, they ran off to the feds and my understanding is that they were told where to put their vibes. I think the real vibe was that they just do not like unions almost as much as they do not like paying a fair day’s wage for a fair day’s work.
On political finance laws—I do not want to steal Mr Ramsay’s thunder—the constitution protects freedom of political communication. Just because someone or a group of people do manual work for a living rather than live off an inheritance of real estate and fossil fuel shares does not mean they should not be able to make their voice heard too.
Secondly, I turn to evidence based. I am not always a fan of the idea of evidence-based policy when the term is used loosely. “Evidence based” was a term borrowed from medicine. Evidence-based medicine is the practice of looking at the outcomes of what you are doing and doing what gets the best outcome. The best outcomes in medicine are easier to define than they are in politics.
In medicine, the idea is that the patient is alive for as long as possible with the best quality of life possible. Our goals in government can be a little more complicated and contested. Some politicians—the crony capitalist variety—try to make wealth healthier. All they end up doing is taking all the money off working people, putting it in the boss’s pockets and destroying the customers. We are seeing this in Australia today with low wage growth.
On the other hand—I will admit this—we do need working capital for factories, buildings and businesses. We can do both and we should do both. The balance between those things is not evidence based but values based. My values base says that an extra dollar in the pocket of the working class will be better spent than in the pocket of someone who has already got a dozen houses.
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