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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.
00:49This 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?
02:59Oh my god.
03:00Explaining 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.
03:13When 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 B.
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?
03:52Through 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.
04:04There is something about being able to register not just your assent, but your dissent in the same process.
04:11That 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.
04:48We have choice here.
04:49In many seats, we wouldn't have a chance without One Nation preferences.
04:52Just like the Labor Party wouldn't have a chance without Green preferences.
04:55That's preferential voting.
04:56For Australian voters, full preferential voting means we express an opinion on every single candidate.
05:07For the Australian Electoral Commission, it 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.
05:24Not you, though.
05:26No.
05:26For the AEC, election day is essentially halfway.
05:29Election day happens.
05:30Fantastic.
05:31But then we have another, you know, at least five weeks or more of just getting everything checked, counted, checked.
05:38All of our process is done so that we can say, election is done, confirmed, and we have an official result.
05:43What are we seeing in this little roped-off area here, Melanie?
05:46Fowler.
05:47Fowler.
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, seeing 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.
06:27Absolutely.
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.
06:43The 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, this 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, must 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 informal.
07:47Informal.
07:47That would be informal.
07:48What are the issues that tend to cause challenge or conflict between scrutineers?
07:55You know, is it literally, that's not a one or?
07:58Yeah, it is about formality.
08:00Handwriting can be an interesting thing.
08:02There's an apocryphal story about a voter in Queensland who 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 think they're being very unique.
08:15Is 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 and wrote a honestly very snarky comment about good luck AEC counting this.
08:28And not realising that I was quite well versed in Roman numerals by that time and have worked out that they'd voted informally because they didn't know their Roman numerals.
08:35No.
08:35So, you know, I'd say if you want your vote to count, vote in clear numbers.
08:41It does slow things down for our purposes.
08:44We just really like a nice clear ballot paper with your preferences.
08:47We haven't even addressed the Senate count yet.
08:51With its bedsheet dimensions and dozens of candidates, the Senate ballot paper is the reason why the AEC provides magnifying glasses.
09:01So, 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, one 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.
09:25All right.
09:26That is a logistical nightmare.
09:27And when the Turnbull government suddenly changed the Senate voting system in 2016 to allow voters to express six preferences above the line rather than just one, the AEC, under intense time pressure, did something unprecedented.
09:45That meant that we had to develop new equipment, new machinery to be able to do that, and new processes and procedures, and the testing was through the roof.
09:57This purpose-designed contraption weighs out Senate papers into piles of 50 and scans them automatically, saving an image of every ballot.
10:08We did all the testing, 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, they were either one ballot paper short or one ballot paper, it was 49, 51, it was never quite right.
10:25In the end, we worked out that the discrepancy was being caused by the weight of the pencil lead on the ballot.
10:32We 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.
10:42It's like a soul.
10:43It 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, and these people are making sure that the preferences have been read and every ballot paper is captured correctly.
10:59Right, so they're humanised, checking the work of the scan, right?
11:03Yes.
11:04So it's sort of like, how many of these squares contain fire hydrants? I 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, and they are thinking their way through their vote,
11:45and how they're allocating those preferences.
11:47It's changing the nature of Australia's elections, and of counts, and of electoral outcomes.
11:5511 weeks after the election, the 150 people who will make up the 48th House of Representatives report for duty.
12:07The headline result is a landslide to Labor.
12:11They have so many MPs that they spill across into the opposition benches.
12:15To 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.
12:31Of these 150 seats, a record 139 were forced to preferences in the most complex and demanding count the AEC has ever seen.
12:45That'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.
12:55The decline in support for Australia's major political parties comes down to changes in the complexion of the Australian society.
13:03Australia is, you know, very diverse, very culturally different country from what it was a couple of decades ago.
13:13There 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.
13:31And 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.
13:39People 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.
13:53I think the community independent is a lot more targeted to communities, representative of communities, and moving away from a one-size-fits-all.
14:02It would not at all surprise me if we end up relatively soon in an environment of just perpetual minority governments.
14:09You can say that's good or bad. It's not really the point I'm making. It's just that that will happen.
14:15The 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.
14:27I 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.
14:44This 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 poll was in November 2022.
15:12It 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.
15:30In 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? How 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?
15:56Well, in Denmark we have a lot of parties. We have actually 12 parties in the parliament right now.
16:01Is 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? I mean, you go to the US, you have a country of 350 million people.
16:25You have two parties. We have 6 million people. We have 12 parties. That's something to...
16:30We just like parties.
16:31Yeah, we just like them. 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 and could be a little unreliable.
16:46What do Danes think about majority governments?
16:51Danes are maybe a little nervous about majority governments because they are, you know, maybe too lazy.
16:57They have the majority. They don't listen to all the voices.
17:00They just get it their way. They don't seek, you know, a broad solution.
17:05So that's the reason why a lot of things, they're very much, they like the minority government because 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. Whoever is in government, they really try hard to have a broad agreement
17:24because it is more reliable for the people outside, for the voters to see that whenever we have a vote,
17:31you know that 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.
17:43The 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.
17:55But this feels like it doesn't really invite sword play.
17:59I guess you don't really have a sort of a direct line between the government and the opposition, though.
18:03No, no, no. We don't have that.
18:05And no shouting.
18:06No shouting. Then they are asked to leave the room.
18:09OK. Have you ever been to Australian Parliament?
18:11I've been to Australia, but not to your parliament, unfortunately.
18:15OK. I'm just going to show you a quick thing.
18:17Just got a little highlights package of what our question time looks like.
18:30It's like the UK.
18:35That's the Australian U. His name's Milton Dick.
18:38Members will leave the galleries quickly and quietly.
18:49Order.
18:50Our record is in one question time, just over 70 minutes, 18 members of parliament ejected from the chamber.
19:01But it could never have happened 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?
19:18Because of an epic piece of colonial power wrangling.
19:24As the six colonies of Australia fumbled their way toward the end of the 1800s,
19:30there were pressing 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 approach rather than six.
19:42But with human beings, the ticklish and unavoidable thing about creating a new seat of power is that it can be quite an anxious process for the owners of the bottoms sitting in the existing seats of power.
19:57And the smaller Australian colonies were all led by guys who weren't exactly in love with the idea of handing over their power to the bigger, richer colonies like New South Wales and 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.
20:20But the mother country's wig-infested House of Lords, where seats were handed from posh fathers to sons like pocket watchers?
20:29Hmm, not quite on brand for a recovering penal colony.
20:33No, I think we're getting more towards the American idea.
20:36The breakthrough came from America.
20:40Australia's designers nicked the idea of the American Senate.
20:44which gave every state the same number of senators, regardless of population.
20:50Thus enabling, in principle, the Senate to be a place where the smaller states could rise up in majestic rebellion and resist the tyranny of Sydney and Melbourne.
21:02The Senate can block government legislation, its serious power.
21:07Thus 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 governor-general plunked on top like a jaunty monarchist cocktail umbrella.
21:24Thus constructed out of spare parts from its divorced parents, the Australian Federation wobbled into existence on January 1st, 1901.
21:34The idea of the Senate as some sort of coliseum for the states to battle it out, with handicaps for the bigger ones, is what got Federation over the line in the first place.
21:49That question, you'll place it on notice.
21:51But it's barely ever worked like that.
21:53I think the idea of a Senate and a body that was able to represent states' rights and states' interests was a good idea at the time.
22:06But 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.
22:23In the Australian Constitution, there's no mention of political parties.
22:27You...the...you know, this is something that's evolved.
22:30This idea of, um, 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.
23:03The Australian Labor Party came first, formed in 1901 from the union groups that had sprung up from disputes
23:10like the Great Shearer's Strike of 1891.
23:14And in 1904, for about two seconds, the Australian Labor Party formed the first national social democratic government in the world.
23:23On the other side of the ledger, a series of non-Labour parties came and went until 1944,
23:30when Robert Menzies whipped them into gear and organised them under the banner of the Liberal Party,
23:36standing for fiscal conservatism and small government.
23:40Why were political parties invented?
23:43Essentially, they allowed like-minded candidates to increase their chances of winning power by grouping together.
23:50And sure enough, the Senate very quickly became a contest of parties rather than states.
23:56For the next 50 years, Labor and Liberal traded government back and forth between them,
24:02each commanding around 40% of the vote and scrabbling every election
24:07to win the hearts and minds of the 20% in the middle.
24:13Parties exist because in the absence of them, you have chaos and the impossibility of...
24:20I mean, you just get gridlock.
24:22The 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.
24:38It's pretty hard to get anything done if you don't end up with a group of people
24:43who decide to work in a concerted way together.
24:45I think the kind of early iterations of liberal democracy in Australia
24:49didn't envisage that we would have a parliament that was completely dominated by
24:54the kind of ideological, entrenched positions of two parties.
24:59The eyes were past 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
25:22and our Senate ballot to create a crossbench that will make that government's life a living hell.
25:29The eyes have it.
25:33Division required? Ring the bells.
25:37Sometimes when you end up with a particularly elaborate crossbench,
25:41do you look at that and think,
25:43this is a demonstration of the Australian people's sense of humour?
25:48Well, 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.
25:57And the Senate, over time, has become more and more and more and more diverse.
26:01The last few seats are always up for grabs,
26:06and so sometimes you get some unusual outcomes.
26:09The two major parties, by necessity to win lower house seats,
26:13cannot have excessive views and therefore reside pretty proximate to one another,
26:19to 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,
26:35where we had, I think it was three senators.
26:38One of them, obviously, was Jackie Lambie,
26:40who really has carved out her own political career since that time,
26:44which demonstrates, I think, her authenticity.
26:47So that was a pretty hectic Senate.
26:49I think the Senate, at times, has saved us from really bad decisions,
26:54but if I was in government, I'll tell you what,
26:58they wouldn't be my favourite people in the world.
27:00It's one of the strengths of our system
27:02that 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?
27:14No, not at all.
27:18I think...
27:20So, when you're in that situation
27:24and you've got to negotiate item by item on legislation,
27:30what techniques do you use?
27:33Sometimes it's frustrating,
27:35sometimes you want the senators to vote differently,
27:38but by and large it does require governments
27:41to sit down with the crossbench in a chamber we don't control
27:46to negotiate the passage of legislation.
27:49Here's where we should mention another thing
27:52that'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.
28:11It'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.
28:22Disunity is death.
28:23Appearances of disunity can be death in politics.
28:26Disunity is death in politics.
28:28Disunity is death.
28:29They say disunity is death.
28:31The Australian Labor Party has probably the most disciplined caucus
28:37anywhere in the world that I can think of for liberal democracy,
28:42where 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,
28:55where 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
29:06on 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,
29:21you are expected to adhere to the decisions of the liberal and national leadership
29:31of 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,
29:45if you have antipathies develop on certain issues, you get chaos.
29:49I wonder if you could talk about how it's affected the parliament
29:53that we have such a rigid binding caucus in our two-party system.
29:58Part of the growing disgruntlement Australians have
30:01with the kind of two-party system is that they want politicians
30:06that 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
30:17in the independent movement and the decline in the popularity
30:22of the two major parties, especially as they become very stringent
30:27on towing party line.
30:29I think that things like conscience votes and individual conscience
30:34really matters in liberal democracies and the capacity for individuals
30:39to be able to say, I don't agree with that, so I'm going to cross the floor.
30:43The idea that we have people who cross the floor,
30:45you know, in other countries, that's just called voting.
30:49Now we've become a lot more in our pens
30:54and it's abhorrent if you move out of it, which is kind of ridiculous.
30:58That's just a form of political control by a clique
31:01over the general political scene.
31:04Barnaby Joyce, who arrived in the parliament in 2005
31:08as a renegade national senator, crossed the floor 19 times
31:14during the Howard government.
31:16He's an Australian standard-bearer for party disunity.
31:20If anybody was to go into the Senate and to put out
31:24that they would never ever consider crossing the floor,
31:27then you're basically useless, aren't you?
31:29It is crazy.
31:30You know, you'd be better to speak against your family
31:34than to speak against the party.
31:36You 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,
31:44I 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 to 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.
31:58There's a real tribalism that doesn't exist elsewhere.
32:02Now, the problem with that is, in people's hearts,
32:07they feel a sense of, I'm letting myself down,
32:10I'm not true to my personal values,
32:13because 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,
32:23people are more inclined to say,
32:25well, the only way I can get away from that tribalism
32:28is to leave the tribe.
32:29With a heavy heart, but a clear conscience,
32:32I 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
32:43after voting with the Greens to support the recognition of Palestine,
32:47which 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,
32:58Senator 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,
33:11let alone 130 years ago, right?
33:14So in order for us to represent our constituencies, our states,
33:20our electorates in the best way possible,
33:23we need to be able to have the freedom and the liberty
33:27to represent their voices without the constraints of caucus solidarity
33:33or 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,
33:44they can have a greater degree of confidence
33:46that that Labor candidate will act in accordance
33:48with 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,
33:59the MP or Senator may have strong ties or beliefs
34:03or her electorate's pressuring them,
34:07they need to be able to exercise their conscience vote.
34:11We have to, as a party,
34:12a government work together to deliver change.
34:14And I accept it's not as fast as some people want.
34:18Sometimes 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
34:31same-sex marriage so you can vote this down too.
34:36Phew, that was a hard time.
34:38When did that long, long story arc
34:42feel the toughest for you personally?
34:45Oh, it was a lot of tough moments.
34:48It was hard to vote against marriage equality the first time.
35:02But it was probably as hard to be in a caucus
35:05where my perspective was in the minority.
35:08The question of same-sex marriage was, in legislative terms, a simple one.
35:16Should the wording of the Marriage Act be changed?
35:19Yes or no?
35:21But the Parliament was loath to make a decision.
35:24Well, it certainly could have answered that question,
35:27but 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,
35:41where so many people had all sorts of different views
35:45for all sorts of different reasons
35:47and all sorts of different personal circumstances,
35:50particularly friends, family members, et cetera,
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,
36:03it 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
36:16about whether or not the Marriage Act should be changed
36:19to allow same-sex marriage,
36:21the decision was subcontracted to the Australian people
36:25via a voluntary postal survey.
36:28Yes responses?
36:307,870,000.
36:34Yes!
36:36The parliament passed the legislation
36:38only after being told to by the people.
36:42There is, naturally, disagreement about whose fault all this was.
36:48The fact that we had to go to a postal vote on marriage equality
36:53is not actually a function of the system not working,
36:56it's a function of the political weakness of the coalition.
36:58They were too scared to move because of their internal opposition
37:02without the cover of a postal vote.
37:06Well, you had internal division as well, right?
37:09It was...
37:10Well, but we resolved that.
37:12You know, we went to a national...
37:15Well, we went to multiple national conferences,
37:17had 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
37:28that would have potentially objected or not voted for it
37:32or abstained, leading to its defeat.
37:36And they like to whitewash that and ignore it,
37:39but it's a very important part of the story.
37:42And that was why the parliament was reluctant to vote
37:45without the plebiscite or then the postal survey,
37:49because it wouldn't have passed the parliament.
37:53Even though I personally didn't support same-sex marriage,
37:58the fact that the decision was made by vote of the entire people
38:05has made it, I think, much easier for people to accept.
38:09And interestingly, what prior to the event
38:14was pitched as being a divisive thing
38:17has turned out actually to be a unifying thing.
38:21No-one argues for changing the law back to what it was.
38:26In practical terms, there aren't any specific rules
38:30about when a government can put an issue to a national vote.
38:34But in other countries,
38:36voters are encouraged to participate between elections.
38:40Back in Denmark, home of consensus,
38:43they love throwing stuff back to the people.
38:46This is a town hall.
38:48And Danes have a range of different ways
38:50they can participate in their democracy.
38:53I'm getting a sense that Danish people are super engaged
38:58with the democratic process.
39:00Yeah, yeah, I would say we are.
39:03I mean, your turnout to vote is above 80%.
39:06Yeah.
39:07Even 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,
39:17I'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, so apart from the parliament,
39:26where everybody is very consultative
39:28and takes all the people's views into account,
39:31you can also rise up as a people
39:34and force the parliament to discuss something
39:36if you don't see it on the agenda, right?
39:38Yeah.
39:39Yeah, we have this thing called a boa force,
39:41like a citizen suggestion.
39:43Uh-huh.
39:44It was started in 2018,
39:47where citizens can register online
39:51and then they come with a suggestion for a law.
39:54Oh, so it's like a petition.
39:55Yeah, make this new law or erase that law.
40:01Mm-hmm.
40:02And if they get 50,000 votes,
40:05the politicians are forced to discuss it in the parliament.
40:08Wow.
40:09Yeah.
40:10Okay.
40:11I have to be honest to say,
40:12I was laughing a lot of the idea when it came,
40:15because I was like,
40:16but if they're forced to discuss it,
40:18they 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,
40:26those, the hippie vegetable feelings kind of time.
40:31Yeah.
40:32But now it turned out that the suggestions
40:35that gets these 50,000 voters,
40:38they take them very seriously
40:39and then they come into the parliament
40:41and they actually discuss these things.
40:43Oh, right.
40:44So it actually makes a difference.
40:46So you've been talked around.
40:47Yeah.
40:48You're now a fan.
40:49Yeah, I think it's good.
40:50I like it now.
40:51We have a kind of lesser or lower understanding
40:54or knowledge of how to get change
40:56in between the ballot box
40:58than other countries that have non-compulsory voting
41:01because that's what you have to do.
41:04You've got to get up and organise.
41:06Compulsory voting is a really good thing
41:08in Australia,
41:09but it may lead to a bit of disengagement
41:11outside of the ballot box.
41:16Our democracy, with its compulsory voting
41:19and its parliamentary standing orders
41:21and conventions,
41:22feels like a rigid and permanent framework.
41:26Immutable.
41:27But that's an illusion.
41:29Change regularly comes from forces that the system didn't anticipate.
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.
41:49The literal Greek translation of the word democracy.
41:53Sometimes people power amasses among the people with the least power of all.
41:59People whose voices the system is not yet trained to hear.
42:04The 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.
42:21The Yirikala region was underlaid by a blanket of bauxite.
42:30And 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
42:44without consulting the traditional owners.
42:47The Yirikala people first saw these little white survey pegs.
42:52No one had asked them for their permission to come onto their land to put these markers across.
42:57This is where the Yirikala Nara met.
43:00So the Nara is like the bush parliament.
43:02They are the representatives of the different clans who were here in the community.
43:07And 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, fight for land rights.
43:34And so they were thinking of ways to, how can we make them listen to us?
43:48The bark petitions were painted in the middle of 1963,
43:53following six months of activities on the Gove Peninsula in North East Arnhem Land.
43:59An extraordinary kind of form of bicultural diplomacy
44:03that involved a kind of written appeal to the parliament,
44:07accompanied by a really important bark 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 bark petition form to the federal parliament.
44:25So they were like a bark 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.
44:52And 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.
45:08See, we're doing things the way you like them done,
45:11with paper and with all the fancy words on a petition,
45:15with signatures and let's listen to each other.
45:19Bala Galili, Two Ways Learning.
45:21So an invitation to negotiate and a political document.
45:25100% a political document
45:27and I reckon one of the founding documents in Australian history.
45:30If the politicians had have understood how to read the story that was being told,
45:36they would have understood that they were land titles,
45:40that they were an exclamation and an explanation of Yirikala inheritance,
45:45of Yirikala landholding, of Yirikala sovereignty over the lands that had just been given away
45:52without any consultation or consent or compensation, which broke Yirikala law.
45:59The government then agreed to empower a select committee of inquiry to go to Yirikala
46:07and 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, which 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.
46:34People we don't like come onto our land and stay on our land.
46:42While the bulldozers ripped 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.
46:52How would you feel if your home was invaded by strangers?
46:58The 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.
47:17Decades of protest that brought powerful Aboriginal voices
47:24to national and international attention.
47:31The 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.
47:51We're coming now to Parliament House,
47:54which 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.
48:07A lot has changed since 1963,
48:11when the 24th Parliament received the Bach petitions
48:15and didn't understand quite how to read them.
48:18Members of the Senate, pray be seated.
48:20That Parliament had no Aboriginal members at all.
48:24And its female representatives could be counted on one hand.
48:29It was a sea of white male faces.
48:33The 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.
48:53Australia's democracy is unique, but, like every democracy, flawed.
48:59You fill in the boxes, starting with number one.
49:03Sometimes it divides us.
49:06But we will decide who comes to this country
49:08and the circumstances in which they come.
49:11Or ignores people it shouldn't.
49:14Or 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 it!
49:25Which have built prosperity.
49:27Paul Keating floated the Australian dollar.
49:29When the phones started ringing in dealing rooms this morning,
49:32trading was frenetic.
49:33Improved lives.
49:35Medicare will provide every permanent resident
49:38with basic health insurance.
49:40This is how democracies change.
49:44Sometimes it's an agonising, unconscionably slow process.
49:47For the pain, suffering and hurt of these stolen generations.
49:52Driven by persistence.
49:54We say sorry.
49:55And 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!
50:09There is no other way!
50:11If a democratic parliament is a conversation
50:14between a government and the governed...
50:17Girls, I cannot wait another day!
50:20This one is listening more closely than it once did.
50:33Something with oversight!
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