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00:00Possibly our most controversial, brilliant, pint-sized, impulsive, known to pack a pistol.
00:09And he created the Australian Federal Police in a fit of rage, after a scallywag threw an egg at him.
00:16When Hughes started out as PM in 1915, he was the leader of the Labour Party, a socialist lawyer from Sydney.
00:24But after a mammoth brawl over conscription, he was expelled from Labour and reinvented himself within months as a Conservative Prime Minister leading the Nationalist Party.
00:35Our first duty as Australian is to Australia.
00:38As you can imagine, not every Conservative voter in Australia was convinced by this sudden conversion.
00:44The farmers in particular started running their own candidates against Hughes' Nationalist Party.
00:50This was a problem for Hughes, because back then, voters only chose one candidate off the ballot paper.
00:56And if half the anti-Labour voters peeled off to the farmers, it would split the Conservative vote, ironically allowing Labour to sneak through and win.
01:06Hughes did something incredibly cunning.
01:09He rammed a bill through Parliament introducing full preferential voting.
01:13There must be a number in every square.
01:15That way, angry cockies could still vote Farmers 1 and Wallop Hughes, while still putting Labour last.
01:24More than a century later, Australia is still the only nation in the world using full preferential voting.
01:32Billy Hughes introduced preferential voting in 1918 to preserve what was already becoming a two-party system.
01:40Labour versus non-Labour.
01:42But, more than a century later, Australian voters are using it to achieve the exact opposite.
01:49Democracies are never static.
02:17They're born, they change, and they can die.
02:22In some countries, these life transitions come about by means of bloody revolution.
02:29In Australia, we tend to choose a different path, a sneakier path.
02:34Much as we lord the legend of Ned Kelly and fancy ourselves larrikins, Australians follow the rules most of the time.
02:43But, inside those rules, we use our people power to set off a quiet riot of change.
02:53We're doing it right now.
02:56Could you explain how preferential voting works?
02:59Explain the preferential voting system is the hardest thing in the world, particularly when you're trying to do it in layman's terms.
03:07What it is, is an incredible safeguard, and we are the envy of many democracies.
03:12I think I used food as an analogy.
03:14When people go into the ballot box with their pencil in their hand, they say, I'd like candidate A to get elected.
03:19You need to get takeaway, and so-and-so wants pizza, and so-and-so wants pasta.
03:25But if they don't get elected, candidate B.
03:28And so-and-so wants some Thai food.
03:30And if people don't like candidate A or B, my preference is candidate C, and the person I like least is candidate D.
03:38It allows minority interests to be visible in the electoral system.
03:43It forces you to think and then commit to, which of these schmucks do I really hate the most?
03:49Which of these schmucks do I hate second most?
03:52Left through to, here's the person I could perhaps put up with if my preferred candidate, number one, can't get elected.
04:00Preferential voting gives us the least disliked candidate.
04:05There is something about being able to register not just your assent, but your dissent in the same process.
04:12That is, I think, ingenious.
04:14It smooths out the result.
04:16It means that we get less polarisation.
04:19Why do you think Australians have started using the preferential system to send a message to major parties?
04:25I think Australian voters are becoming a lot more switched on about the power of their own vote
04:30and the potential that they have in a preferential voting system,
04:34and increasingly to actually elect alternatives, whether they be minor parties or independents.
04:40People are waking up to the idea that the two-major-party duopoly is not all they get to pick from.
04:47We have choice here.
04:50In many seats, we wouldn't have a chance without one-nation preferences.
04:52Just like the Labour Party wouldn't have a chance without green preferences, that's preferential voting.
05:00For Australian voters, full preferential voting means we express an opinion on every single candidate.
05:07For the Australian Electoral Commission,
05:09it means one of the most fiendishly complicated counting processes in the democratic world.
05:16For most Australians, the election night is over.
05:21Everybody's put their beer cans in the recycling and moved on.
05:25Not you, though.
05:25No, for the AEC, election day is essentially half-halfway.
05:30Election day happens, fantastic, but then we have another, you know, at least five weeks or more
05:35of just getting everything checked, counted, checked, all of our process is done
05:39so that we can say election is done, confirmed, and we have an official result.
05:43What are we seeing in this little rope dock area here, Melanie?
05:46So this is Fowler.
05:47This is fresh scrutiny.
05:50So this is that second check of what's been counted on Saturday night.
05:55So all of our staff are, you know, taking their time, formality checking every single paper,
06:01seeing where it goes to for their first preference,
06:04and then doing a count again to make sure the numbers that we've got are right.
06:09But they do get looked at one more time, at the full distribution of preferences.
06:12It's so hard, isn't it, now that there's so many people voting for third parties and independents,
06:19because those preferences can change elections for major party candidates.
06:25We've seen that in heaps of seats.
06:28Absolutely.
06:28Especially we've got a lot of close seats or interesting seats this election.
06:32You know, there's been a lot of seats where it's not actually very clear.
06:35The real power of preferential voting is the degree of control it gives to voters.
06:41The winner isn't just the person who got the most number one votes or primary votes.
06:49In our system, the candidate with the fewest primary votes is eliminated.
06:55And their votes are chucked back into the count,
06:58this time added to the pile of whichever candidate that voter put at number two.
07:04And so on, and so on, until somebody gets above 50%.
07:09And yes, this does mean you can win a seat, even if you didn't get the highest number of primary votes.
07:17So tell me what happens when a seat gets very, very close.
07:22So candidates are entitled to appoint scrutineers to come and observe the process for them.
07:27They can do that in any seat.
07:28But where a seat is really close, they're very interested, of course, in where the votes are going.
07:32They have the right to challenge.
07:33So if they think that a count staff member has put it in the wrong place, they can challenge it.
07:37And then that must be determined by the divisional returning officer,
07:40must make the final decision on that as to where it goes.
07:43It's very hard to tell which two is two.
07:45I would say one more point.
07:47One more point.
07:47One more point.
07:48That would be one more point.
07:49What are the issues that tend to cause challenge or conflict between scrutineers?
07:55Is it literally, that's not a one?
07:58Yeah, it is about formality.
08:00Handwriting can be an interesting thing.
08:02There's an apocryphal story about a voter in Queensland
08:05who used to vote below the line in the Senate in Roman numerals.
08:09Oh, we get a lot of Roman numerals.
08:11Yes, I think a lot of people who vote with Roman numerals below the line
08:14think they're being very unique.
08:16Is this a movement?
08:17It's a movement.
08:18I remember we had one, they had marked below the line every single box in Roman numerals
08:24and wrote a honestly very snarky comment about good luck at AEC counting this
08:27and not realising that I was quite well versed in Roman numerals by that time
08:31and have worked out that they'd voted informally
08:33because they didn't know their Roman numerals.
08:34So, you know, I'd say if you want your vote to count, vote in clear numbers.
08:41It does slow things down.
08:43For our purposes, we just really like a nice clear ballot paper with your preferences.
08:48We haven't even addressed the Senate count yet.
08:51With its bedsheet dimensions and dozens of candidates,
08:54the Senate ballot paper is the reason why the AEC provides magnifying glasses.
09:03Wow.
09:05So how many of these Senate voting counting layers have you got around Australia?
09:10There are eight around the country, one in every state and territory,
09:14one for each Senate election.
09:15And this one only does New South Wales?
09:16Correct.
09:17And how many Senate ballot papers is this place going to handle over the whole process?
09:22A bit over 5.2 million ballot papers.
09:25Oh, all right.
09:26That is a logistical nightmare.
09:28And when the Turnbull government suddenly changed the Senate voting system in 2016
09:34to allow voters to express six preferences above the line rather than just one,
09:40the AEC, under intense time pressure, did something unprecedented.
09:45They brought in the machines.
09:49That meant that we had to develop new equipment, new machinery to be able to do that,
09:53and new processes and procedures, and the testing was through the roof.
09:57This purpose-designed contraption weighs out Senate papers into piles of 50
10:03and scans them automatically, saving an image of every ballot.
10:09We did all the testing, had blank ballot papers, we tested the scales, the whole system worked.
10:14But when we were doing it live, quite often when those bundles came in,
10:21they were either one ballot paper short or one ballot paper, it was 49, 51, it was never quite right.
10:26In the end, we worked out that the discrepancy was being caused by the weight of the pencil length on the ballot.
10:33We hadn't factored that in, and so then we had to recalibrate those scales to put that in to make sure that we actually got the 50 ballot papers.
10:41So it's the weight of the vote. It's like a soul. It actually has a weight as well.
10:47So what are all these people doing?
10:49Once the images are captured by the scanners, the computer tries to read it,
10:54and these people are making sure that the preferences have been read in every ballot paper is captured correctly.
10:59Right, so they're humanised, checking the work of the scan.
11:04Yes.
11:04So it's sort of like, how many of these squares contain fire hydrants?
11:08I am not a robot.
11:09Yes.
11:10Right.
11:17This collaboration between human and machine will still take weeks and weeks to spit out the full result in the Senate,
11:25where Australians have historically delighted in voting for minor parties and independents.
11:32The big change this century is that we're now doing that in the lower house too.
11:38I think Australians embrace the full preferential voting system,
11:43and they're thinking their way through their vote, and how they're allocating those preferences.
11:47It's changing the nature of Australia's elections, and of counts, and of electoral outcomes.
11:58Eleven weeks after the election, the 150 people who will make up the 48th House of Representatives report for duty.
12:06The headline result is a landslide to Labor.
12:11They have so many MPs that they spill across into the opposition benches.
12:16To look at the chamber, you'd think the two-party system had never been in better shape.
12:21At a time of declining electoral turnouts around the world, a record number of Australians had their say.
12:27But there's an underlying truth that's not visible to the naked eye.
12:32Of these 150 seats, a record 139 were forced to preferences in the most complex and demanding count the AEC has ever seen.
12:44That's because, for the first time in history, more than one-third of voters put a number one next to a candidate that wasn't from Labor or the Coalition.
12:56The decline in support for Australia's major political parties comes down to changes in the complexion of the Australian society.
13:02Australia is, you know, very diverse, very culturally different country from what it was a couple of decades ago.
13:14There are things that people want fixed that aren't being addressed by either side of politics.
13:20And so they look for other people to represent their interests.
13:24More than anything, so many people now don't feel like they're being listened to.
13:30And so they resort to people who they feel are at least listening to, or at least are echoing their sentiments, and therefore they feel listened to.
13:40People have taken it on themselves and said, you know what, if the two major parties, the two major parties of WAPLI aren't going to address our issues,
13:47well, we're going to push for independent voices that are from our community, for our community.
13:54I think the community independent is a lot more targeted to communities, representative of communities, and moving away from a one-size-fits-all.
14:03It would not at all surprise me if we end up relatively soon in an environment of just perpetual minority governments.
14:10You can say that's good or bad, it's not really the point I'm making, it's just that that will happen.
14:15And the Europeanisation of Australian politics, let's say, is not necessarily very far away.
14:21I see a lot of journalists talk about this, who think minority government is a bad thing, and think that where we're headed is a bad thing.
14:28I see some journalists just lose their heads over it.
14:31I definitely think for a strong democracy, you not only need a strong opposition, but perhaps we could look at nations and countries like Denmark, you know, who have minority governments.
14:45All right, let's look at Denmark.
14:49This is the Danish parliament, where a dizzying range of parties squeeze into the benches of a single chamber parliament that's smaller than ours.
15:01It's been more than a century since a single party held government here.
15:06Last time the Danes went to the polls was in November 2022.
15:13It took a month and a half for a governing coalition of parties to be achieved.
15:18And when it formed, it was surprising.
15:21A partnership between the major centre left-wing party and the major centre right-wing party.
15:27In Australian terms, it's like Labour and Liberal governing together.
15:36Let that sink in.
15:39Mr Speaker, I feel very close to the centre of Danish power.
15:43How many people work in this chamber?
15:45How many MPs do you have?
15:46We have 179 MPs, 175 from Denmark, two from the Fair Islands and two from Greenland.
15:53Right, and how many parties are operating in this chamber?
15:57Well, in Denmark we have a lot of parties.
15:59We have actually 12 parties in the parliament right now, yes.
16:02Is that because no one party ever gets a majority in Denmark?
16:06Yes, I mean, the biggest party will normally be around 25% of the votes.
16:12To go to the parliament, you need 2% of the voters.
16:15And that's the reason why you have a lot of parties.
16:17So you open the doors to even the tiny, tiny parties.
16:20Yeah, and it's funny, isn't it?
16:22I mean, you go to the US, you have a country of 350 million people, you have two parties.
16:26We have 6 million people, we have 12 parties.
16:29That's something too.
16:30You just like parties.
16:31Yeah, we just like, but it makes it complicated sometimes.
16:35In Australia, we have most of the time majority governments.
16:39And we're nervous about the idea of minority governments because we think they're chaotic
16:43and could be a little unreliable.
16:45So what do Danes think about majority governments?
16:51Danes are maybe a little nervous about majority governments because they are, you know, maybe
16:56too lazy.
16:57They have the majority.
16:58They don't listen to all the voices.
17:00They just get it their way.
17:02They don't seek, you know, a broad solution.
17:05So that's the reason why a lot of Danes, they're very much, they like the minority government
17:10because they have to be on their toes to stay in power.
17:14Is it exhausting to practice consensus?
17:17No, I don't think so.
17:19Whoever is in government, they really try hard to have a broad agreement because it is more
17:26reliable for the people outside, for the voters to see that whenever we have a vote, you know
17:32that it is there not only to the next election, but for a period of time.
17:37And you try not to do it my way or the highway.
17:41We have a bench, the prime minister and the opposition leader sit opposite each other.
17:47They are traditionally two swords lengths apart.
17:51I mean, that is the adversarial model for our parliamentary system.
17:54But this feels like it doesn't really invite swordplay.
17:59I guess you don't really have a sort of a direct line between the government and the opposition,
18:03though.
18:03No, no, no.
18:04We don't have that.
18:05And no shouting.
18:06No shouting.
18:07Then they are asked to leave the room.
18:09Okay.
18:09Have you ever been to Australian parliament?
18:11I've been to Australia, but not to your parliament, unfortunately.
18:15Okay.
18:15I'm just going to show you a quick thing.
18:17Just got a little highlights package of what our question time looks like.
18:21He's like the UK.
18:33Okay.
18:34The UK.
18:34Order.
18:36That's the Australian you.
18:37His name's Milton Dick.
18:39Members will leave the galleries.
18:43Quickly.
18:44And quietly.
18:46Our record is in one question time, just over 70 minutes, 18 members of parliament ejected
18:59from the chamber.
19:01But it could never happen in the Danish parliament because it would not be allowed.
19:05There's also this, you don't argue with the speaker, period.
19:11Denmark's parliament has only one chamber.
19:16Ours has two.
19:18Why?
19:20Because of an epic piece of colonial power wrangling.
19:24As the six colonies of Australia fumbled their way toward the end of the 1800s, there were
19:30pressing and obvious reasons to come together as a nation.
19:35Defence, trade and immigration all seemed like matters where it made sense to have one
19:41approach rather than six.
19:43But with human beings, the ticklish and unavoidable thing about creating a new seat of power
19:50is that it can be quite an anxious process for the owners of the bottoms sitting in the existing
19:56seats of power.
19:58And the smaller Australian colonies were all led by guys who weren't exactly in love with
20:03the idea of handing over their power to the bigger, richer colonies like New South Wales
20:08and Victoria.
20:09What kind of design for a national parliament could possibly ease their fears?
20:14The British system and the House of Commons seemed an obvious place to start.
20:19But the mother country's wig-infested House of Lords, where seats were handed from posh fathers
20:26to sons like pocket watches?
20:28Hmm, not quite on brand for a recovering penal colony.
20:32No, I think we're getting more towards the American idea.
20:37The breakthrough came from America.
20:40Australia's designers nicked the idea of the American Senate, which gave every state the
20:46same number of senators, regardless of population.
20:50That's enabling, in principle, the Senate to be a place where the smaller states could rise
20:55up in majestic rebellion and resist the tyranny of Sydney and Melbourne.
21:01The Senate can block government legislation, its serious power.
21:06Thus was born a sort of Franken-parliament, which became known as the Washminster system.
21:13Half Westminster House of Commons, half Washington's Senate, with a largely ceremonial
21:19Governor-General plonked on top like a jaunty monarchist cocktail umbrella.
21:25Thus constructed out of spare parts from its divorced parents, the Australian Federation
21:31wobbled into existence on January the 1st, 1901.
21:38The idea of the Senate as some sort of coliseum for the states to battle it out, with handicaps
21:44for the bigger ones, is what got Federation over the line in the first place.
21:49So that question, you'll place it on notes.
21:51But it's barely ever worked like that.
21:55I think the idea of a Senate and a body that was able to represent states' rights and states'
22:04interests was a good idea at the time.
22:07But that's not how it's panned out.
22:09And over the century or so, we've seen that the Senate does not represent states' issues.
22:16The reality is that professional political parties have taken over our parliamentary system.
22:24In the Australian constitution, there's no mention of political parties.
22:29This is something that's evolved.
22:31This idea of attachment to the executive, the senior party members, what they say goes,
22:40that was not the case back then.
22:42There's a perfectly good reason why our constitutional drafters didn't mention political parties.
22:50At time of writing, they hadn't been invented yet.
22:54Lots of powerful elements in our democracy aren't mentioned at all in the constitution,
22:59like local government or the Prime Minister, if you can believe it.
23:04The Australian Labor Party came first, formed in 1901 from the union groups that had sprung up from disputes like the Great Shearer's Strike of 1891.
23:15And in 1904, for about two seconds, the Australian Labor Party formed the first national social democratic government in the world.
23:24On the other side of the ledger, a series of non-Labour parties came and went until 1944,
23:31when Robert Menzies whipped them into gear and organised them under the banner of the Liberal Party,
23:37standing for fiscal conservatism and small government.
23:41Why were political parties invented?
23:44Essentially, they allowed like-minded candidates to increase their chances of winning power by grouping together.
23:51And sure enough, the Senate very quickly became a contest of parties rather than states.
23:57For the next 50 years, Labor and Liberal traded government back and forth between them,
24:03each commanding around 40% of the vote and scrabbling every election to win the hearts and minds of the 20% in the middle.
24:14Parties exist because in the absence of them, you have chaos and the impossibility of...
24:21I mean, you just get gridlock.
24:23The remarkable thing in Australia is we still have the two dominant political parties.
24:29Our parties exist by convention, convenience, perhaps, probably better to say practical necessity.
24:39It's pretty hard to get anything done if you don't end up with a group of people who decide to work in a concerted way together.
24:46I think the kind of early iterations of Liberal democracy in Australia didn't envisage that we would have a parliament that was completely dominated by the kind of ideological, entrenched positions of two parties.
24:59The eyes were passed to the right of the chair, the nose to the left.
25:02But Australian voters do not like handing over absolute control.
25:07And as the parties consolidated their power, Australians quietly foiled them in the polling booth.
25:15It's now customary that we use our lower house ballot to appoint a party to government and our Senate ballot to create a crossbench that will make that government's life a living hell.
25:30No.
25:31The eyes have it.
25:32The nose have it.
25:33The nose have it.
25:34Division required?
25:35Ring the bells.
25:36Sometimes when you end up with a particularly elaborate crossbench, do you look at that and think, this is a demonstration of the Australian people's sense of humour?
25:49Well, we don't know we're creating a crossbench, but yes, yeah, they do.
25:55People go shopping in the Senate without a shadow of a doubt and the Senate over time has become more and more and more and more diverse.
26:02The last few seats are always up for grabs and so sometimes you get some unusual outcomes.
26:10The two major parties by necessity to win lower house seats cannot have excessive views and therefore reside pretty proximate to one another to be quite frank.
26:20People who have stronger views become more noticed in the Senate.
26:26What's the most hectic crossbench you've ever had to negotiate with?
26:31Probably the Palmer United Party period where we had, I think it was three senators.
26:38One of them obviously was Jackie Lambie, who really has carved out her own political career since that time, which demonstrates, I think, her authenticity.
26:47So that was a pretty hectic Senate.
26:50I think the Senate at times has saved us from really bad decisions, but if I was in government, I'll tell you what, they wouldn't be my favourite people in the world.
27:00It's one of the strengths of our system that power can't be concentrated in one place.
27:05It prevents one part of government or of the state having too much power.
27:11So you're advising people not to vote Labor in the Senate?
27:16No, not at all.
27:18I think...
27:21So when you're in that situation and you've got to negotiate item by item on legislation, what techniques do you use?
27:33Sometimes it's frustrating, sometimes you want the senators to vote differently, but by and large it does require governments to sit down with the crossbench in a chamber we don't control to negotiate the passage of legislation.
27:50Here's where we should mention another thing that's unusual about the Australian political system.
27:56In these parts, voting against your party is a big deal.
28:00Bigger than in any comparable democracy.
28:05Labor Party rules forbid disloyalty on pain of expulsion.
28:10It's generated an expression that's unique to Australian politics.
28:17Disunity within any party or any side of politics is death.
28:20Disunity is death.
28:22Appearances of disunity can be death in politics.
28:26Disunity is death in politics.
28:28Disunity is death.
28:29They say disunity is death.
28:31Well, the Australian Labor Party has probably the most disciplined caucus anywhere in the world that I can think of a liberal democracy, where you basically defy it and you're essentially expelled.
28:46I mean, it's off the charts.
28:49The Liberal Party does not have that.
28:51But in practice, as a counterbalance, it's a sort of gravitational force.
28:57It's kind of dragged disproportionately in the same direction.
29:01We've always respected the right of people to cross the floor on issues where they feel extremely strongly.
29:09It hasn't been an automatic expulsion offence as it has been for Labor people.
29:16In the end, if you are elected as a Liberal or a National, you are expected to adhere to the decisions of the Liberal and National leadership of the coalition party room.
29:33To govern, you have to be able to control the chamber.
29:35And to do that, you have to maintain some sort of control of your members.
29:39You have to all agree on a common position and you stick by it.
29:42If you start to fall apart, if you start to split, if you have antipathies develop on certain issues, you get chaos.
29:49I wonder if you could talk about how it's affected the parliament that we have such a rigid binding caucus in our two party system.
29:58Part of the growing disgruntlement Australians have with the kind of two party system is that they want politicians that represent their views.
30:08That's technically the purpose of a democracy and not head office.
30:12I definitely think there is a correlation between the growth in the independent movement and the decline in the popularity of the two major parties, especially as they become very stringent on towing party line.
30:29I think that things like conscience votes and individual conscience really matters in liberal democracies.
30:36And the capacity for individuals to be able to say, I don't agree with that, so I'm going to cross the floor.
30:42The idea that we have people who cross the floor, you know, in other countries, that's just called voting.
30:48Now we've become a lot more in our pens and it's abhorrent if you move out of it, which is kind of ridiculous.
30:57That's just a form of political control by a clique over the general political scene.
31:03Barnaby Joyce, who arrived in the parliament in 2005 as a renegade national senator, crossed the floor 19 times during the Howard government.
31:15He's an Australian standard bearer for party disunity.
31:20If anybody was to go into the Senate and to put out that they would never ever consider crossing the floor, then you're basically useless, aren't you?
31:29It is crazy.
31:30You know, you'd be better to speak against your family than to speak against the party.
31:35It's, you know, people don't talk to you.
31:38I'll give you a colourful story.
31:40At the start, when I first came into parliament, I couldn't get a seat in the joint party room.
31:47I'd literally go to sit somewhere and say, that seat's taken.
31:50Then I'd go sit somewhere and say, that seat's taken.
31:52And so I literally had to go next door, grab a seat and bring it in.
31:55I sat by myself for dinner and tea for years.
31:59There's a real tribalism that doesn't exist elsewhere.
32:02Now, the problem with that is in people's hearts, they feel a sense of, I'm letting myself down.
32:10I'm not true to my personal values because I haven't been given the liberty on certain issues to move.
32:17That has evolved in Australia.
32:19It wasn't always like that.
32:20And because it's so prominent now, people are more inclined to say, well, the only way I can get away from that tribalism is to leave the tribe.
32:29With a heavy heart, but a clear conscience, I announce my resignation from the Australian Labor Party.
32:36Fanima Payman is an ex-Labor Senator.
32:40She split with the Labor Party in 2024 after voting with the Greens to support the recognition of Palestine,
32:46which was formal Labor policy at the time.
32:50The issue wasn't Palestine.
32:52It was backing a Greens motion against Labor instructions.
32:57By her own actions, Senator Payman has placed herself outside the privilege.
33:01That comes with participating in the Federal Parliamentary Labor Party caucus.
33:06Modern day Australia looks very different to what it did 30 years ago, let alone 130 years ago, right?
33:14So in order for us to represent our constituencies, our states, our electorates in the best way possible,
33:23we need to be able to have the freedom and the liberty to represent their voices without the constraints of caucus solidarity or this binding rule.
33:35We believe in collectives.
33:36We believe in the power of collectives to give effect to change.
33:41When voters vote for a Labor candidate, they can have a greater degree of confidence that that Labor candidate will act in accordance with the party's election platform,
33:51which is primarily what the voter is looking to.
33:54But in situations where it may be a sensitive topic, the MP or Senator may have strong ties or beliefs or her electorate's pressuring them,
34:07they need to be able to exercise their conscience vote.
34:11We have to, as a party, a government, work together to deliver change.
34:14And I accept it's not as fast as some people want.
34:19Sometimes it's faster than others want.
34:21I accept that some people want us to go further.
34:24Some people think we've gone far enough.
34:26I was told, you know, Penny Wong had to vote down same-sex marriage, so you can vote this down too.
34:36That was a hard time.
34:38When did that long, long story arc feel the toughest for you personally?
34:47Oh, it was a lot of tough moments.
34:53It was hard to...
34:56It was hard to vote against marriage equality the first time.
35:02But it was probably as hard to be in a caucus where my perspective was in the minority.
35:09The question of same-sex marriage was, in legislative terms, a simple one.
35:16Should the wording of the Marriage Act be changed, yes or no?
35:21But the Parliament was loath to make a decision.
35:25Well, it certainly could have answered that question, but I thought there was a better way of dealing with it.
35:30I took the view that something as personal, as deeply personal as same-sex marriage,
35:40where so many people had all sorts of different views for all sorts of different reasons,
35:47and all sorts of different personal circumstances, particularly friends, family members, etc.,
35:54who might have had a big stake in this one way or another.
35:57I took the view that if the decision were to be made, it would be better made through a plebiscite than through a parliament.
36:10And in 2016, after more than a decade of parliamentary fumbling and indecision
36:15about whether or not the Marriage Act should be changed to allow same-sex marriage,
36:20the decision was subcontracted to the Australian people via a voluntary postal survey.
36:28Yes responses?
36:317,870,000.
36:36The Parliament passed the legislation only after being told to by the people.
36:43There is, naturally, disagreement about whose fault all this was.
36:50The fact that we had to go to a postal vote on marriage equality is not actually a function of the system not working,
36:56it's a function of the political weakness of the coalition.
36:59They were too scared to move because of their internal opposition without the cover of a postal vote.
37:07Well, you had internal division as well, right?
37:09Well, but we resolved that.
37:13We went to multiple national conferences, had a lot of arguments, and we resolved that.
37:19The coalition couldn't do it without going to the people.
37:23The Labor Party didn't push it because it was Labor senators that would have potentially objected,
37:31or not voted for it, or abstained, leading to its defeat.
37:35And they like to whitewash that and ignore it, but it's a very important part of the story.
37:41And that was why the Parliament was reluctant to vote without the plebiscite,
37:47or then the postal survey, because it wouldn't have passed the Parliament.
37:52Even though I personally didn't support same-sex marriage, the fact that the decision was made by vote of the entire people has made it, I think, much easier for people to accept.
38:09And interestingly, what prior to the event was pitched as being a divisive thing has turned out actually to be a unifying thing.
38:22No-one argues for changing the law back to what it was.
38:27In practical terms, there aren't any specific rules about when a government can put an issue to a national vote.
38:35But in other countries, voters are encouraged to participate between elections.
38:40Back in Denmark, home of consensus, they love throwing stuff back to the people.
38:46This is a town hall.
38:48And Danes have a range of different ways they can participate in their democracy.
38:53I'm getting a sense that Danish people are super engaged with the democratic process.
39:00Yeah.
39:01Yeah, I would say we are.
39:03I mean, your turnout to vote is above 80%, even though you don't have compulsory voting.
39:09Yeah, we're not forced to vote like you guys.
39:11What do you think about that?
39:12I think it's crazy.
39:13Really?
39:14Yeah.
39:15Because if someone forced me to do something, I'm like, then I don't want to do it.
39:19I would like to go vote because I believe in our democracy.
39:23Ah.
39:24So, apart from the parliament, where everybody is very consultative and takes all the people's views into account,
39:31you can also rise up as a people and force the parliament to discuss something if you don't see it on the agenda, right?
39:38Yeah.
39:39Yeah, we have this thing called a boa force, like a citizen suggestion.
39:44Uh-huh.
39:45It was started in 2018, where citizens can register online and then they come with a suggestion for a law.
39:55Oh, so it's like a petition.
39:56Yeah.
39:57Make this new law or erase that law.
40:01Mm-hmm.
40:02And if they get 50,000 votes, the politicians are forced to discuss it in the parliament.
40:08Wow.
40:09Yeah.
40:10Okay.
40:11And I have to be honest to say, I was laughing a lot of the idea when it came because I was like,
40:16but if they're forced to discuss it, they will not take it seriously.
40:19Right.
40:20Whose idea was it?
40:21It was like one of the very left parties.
40:23Oh.
40:24Uh, like, you know, those, the hippie vegetable feelings kind of party.
40:30Yeah.
40:31But now it turned out that the suggestions that gets these 50,000 voters, they take them very seriously
40:39and then they come into the parliament and they actually discuss these things.
40:43Oh, what?
40:44So it actually makes a difference.
40:45So you've been talked around.
40:46Yeah.
40:47You're now a fan.
40:48Yeah, I think it's good.
40:49I like it now.
40:50We have a kind of lesser or lower understanding or knowledge of how to get change in between
40:56the ballot box than other countries that have non-compulsory voting because that's what
41:03you have to do.
41:04You've got to get up and organise.
41:06Compulsory voting is a really good thing in Australia, but it may lead to a bit of disengagement
41:12outside of the ballot box.
41:15Our democracy, with its compulsory voting and its parliamentary standing orders and conventions,
41:23feels like a rigid and permanent framework.
41:27Immutable.
41:28But that's an illusion.
41:30change regularly comes from forces that the system didn't anticipate.
41:35Popular democracy.
41:36Political parties for one.
41:39Vested and foreign interests for another.
41:42But there's a consistent factor with the capacity to confound all of them.
41:47People power.
41:48People power.
41:49The literal Greek translation of the word democracy.
41:53Sometimes people power amasses among the people with the least power of all.
42:00People whose voices the system is not yet trained to hear.
42:05The township of Yirikala has an official head count of 657.
42:11But this tiny community has changed the course of our nation's history.
42:16And it began before most of its residents had even been allowed to vote.
42:22The Yirikala region was underlaid by a blanket of bauxite.
42:29And bauxite was a precious mineral in the 1950s.
42:35What the parliament did was pass a law that allowed a mining company to mine for bauxite
42:43without consulting the traditional owners.
42:46The Yirikala people first saw these little white survey pegs.
42:52No one had asked them for their permission to come onto their land
42:55to put these markers across.
42:57This is where the Yirikala Nara met.
43:00So the Nara is like the bush parliament
43:02that are the representatives of the different clans who were here in the community.
43:06And they would come together and there were a lot of decisions to be made.
43:10They knew that danger was coming and they knew they had to do something about it.
43:13The mining company holds a lease for 57 square miles.
43:17The land has been withdrawn from the reserve to allow the development.
43:21The Yirikala people decided, you know, if this is going to keep on going,
43:26we need to say something to the government.
43:28The government has to hear our voice.
43:30It was a fight.
43:32Fight for land rights.
43:34The Barque petitions were painted in the middle of 1963,
43:52following six months of activities on the Gove Peninsula in North East Arnhem Land.
43:58An extraordinary kind of form of bicultural diplomacy
44:03that involved a kind of written appeal to the parliament,
44:07accompanied by a really important Barque etching painting,
44:12which spoke to the sovereignty of the Yirikala people
44:16and who they are and who their people are.
44:19And that was presented in a Barque petition form to the federal parliament.
44:24So they were like a Barque emissary from the Yirikala parliament,
44:29the sovereign nation of the Yirikala people,
44:32to the sovereign nation of the Commonwealth of Australia,
44:35asking for consideration to be made about Yirikala law being obeyed,
44:41which it hadn't been when the mining companies came on
44:44and started to prospect and started to peg out their boundaries.
44:49And so it was really an act of diplomacy.
44:51And we tend to think of them now as being a kind of an object or an artwork.
44:56But essentially these were a gift.
44:58They were a kind of treaty in order to say,
45:02please understand where we're coming from.
45:05We're trying to understand where you're coming from.
45:07See, we're doing things the way you like them done,
45:10with paper and with all the fancy words on a petition,
45:14with signatures and let's listen to each other.
45:18Balagalili, two ways learning.
45:21So an invitation to negotiate and a political document?
45:24A hundred percent a political document
45:26and I reckon one of the founding documents in Australian history.
45:29If the politicians had understood how to read the story that was being told,
45:35they would have understood that they were land titles,
45:39that they were an exclamation and an explanation of Yirikala inheritance,
45:44of Yirikala landholding, of Yirikala sovereignty over the lands
45:49that had just been given away without any consultation or consent or compensation,
45:56which broke Yirikala law.
45:59The government then agreed to empower a select committee of inquiry
46:05to go to Yirikala and to directly investigate the grievances of the Yirikala people.
46:12And effectively the recommendations that it made found in favour of the Yirikala.
46:18The findings were given just before the election,
46:21which Menzies won in a landslide.
46:24And effectively all of the recommendations of the select committee
46:28were just washed away with the tide of history.
46:32Mining went ahead.
46:38People we don't like come onto our land and stay on our land.
46:43While the bulldozers rip the valuable ore from the earth
46:46and freighters come into the bay to ship it overseas,
46:49the Aborigines are fighting their claim in a white man's court.
46:53How would you feel if your home was invaded by strangers?
46:59The lives of the Yirikala were changed irrevocably.
47:04But for the signatories of the petition and their descendants,
47:08it was just the beginning of a decades-long battle.
47:11And for Australia, the petitions marked the beginnings of the land rights movement.
47:20Decades of protest that brought powerful Aboriginal voices
47:24to national and international attention.
47:27The Yunupingu brothers spent a lifetime seeking justice.
47:35The mining company and the government has to learn some lessons.
47:39Dr Yunupingu did not live to see the High Court finally, in 2025,
47:44rule that the Yongu people were entitled to compensation
47:48for the loss of their land.
47:50We're coming now to Parliament House, which you can see on the left-hand side of the coach.
47:57It is in this Parliament House that the laws which govern our country are made.
48:02A lot has changed since 1963, when the 24th Parliament received the Bach petitions
48:15and didn't understand quite how to read them.
48:18Members of the Synod, pray be seated.
48:20That Parliament had no Aboriginal members at all.
48:24And its female representatives could be counted on one hand.
48:28It was a sea of white male faces.
48:31The 48th Parliament we just elected has ten First Nations representatives.
48:39And, for the first time ever, is 50% female.
48:44This Parliament, thanks to the relentless force of people power,
48:48is starting to look a lot more like the population it represents.
48:52Australia's democracy is unique, but, like every democracy, flawed.
48:59You fill in the boxes, starting with number one.
49:02Sometimes it divides us.
49:05But we will decide who comes to this country and the circumstances in which they come.
49:11Or ignores people it shouldn't.
49:13Or looks away from problems that seem too hard to fix.
49:18Every black death in custody.
49:20But at other times, we've made hard decisions together.
49:24Australia has done them!
49:25Which have built prosperity.
49:27Paul Keating floated the Australian dollar.
49:29When the phones started ringing in dealing rooms this morning, trading was frenetic.
49:33Improved lives.
49:35Medicare will provide every permanent resident with basic health insurance.
49:40This is how democracies change.
49:43Sometimes it's an agonising, unconscionably slow process.
49:47For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations.
49:51Driven by persistence.
49:53We say sorry.
49:54And courage.
49:56We don't want the GST!
49:58This country desperately needs a new taxation system.
50:03Sometimes change is born quickly out of shocking events.
50:07There is no other way! There is no other way!
50:10If a democratic parliament is a conversation between a government and the governed...
50:16Gaza cannot wait another day!
50:19This one is listening more closely...
50:22..than it once did.
50:25in our main elephant skin outdoors.
50:26That's great.
50:27.
50:33Yeah.
50:34That's sober of lying!
50:36To be under the war's sfx.
50:38That I was here, inner andnings.
50:39Ah!
50:40.
50:42A meeting of people and humans,
50:44hurt ingly missed out of Sigurds,
50:46get up.
50:47That's great.
50:48We can't hold back.
50:49To be under obstetive,
50:50this is the siege,
50:51or a command to a man followers could have witnessed the whole world.
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