Hudson BrettBRETT HUDSON (National): Thank you Madam Chair. I made it! I want to speak principally to—Hon Member: It's only because you blocked the view of everyone else.BRETT HUDSON: —that's right—clause 5 and new section 55AAB. But before I do that I just want to make a few comments on the contributions of the Minister in the chair earlier.The first one—which he reiterated just after the dinner break but spoke a little bit more on just prior to that—is his seeming misunderstanding about what creates the proportionality of Parliament. His claim was that a by-election would not distort proportionality of Parliament because the electorate made that decision. Well here's the news for Mr Little: the proportionality of Parliament is not set by the electorate votes of 71 electorates; it is formed by—in the last election—around 2.5 million party votes that were cast right across the country and that were tallied together and those gave the proportions. Now in a by-election you have a possibility that the party the electorate MP comes from could be determined by less than 1 percent of the voters that formed the proportionality of Parliament. So there is no way—there is no pin with a head large enough to dance on—that would hold that that maintains proportionality of Parliament. The Minister needs to school himself a little more on that.The other point the Minister raised in an earlier contribution was the view that some 21-odd constitutional experts were wrong and he was right. I listened to this. I listened to this position and I thought of Blackadder. In an episode of Blackadder Blackadder says to Captain Rum Isn't it standard maritime practice to have a crew?" and Captain Rum says "Opinion is divided on the subject. Everyone else thinks you do and I think you don't." Mr Little you did a great job of paraphrasing Captain Rum in the committee tonight.But to clause 5 which introduces section 55AAB(a)—this is the purpose part to the sections introduced with this clause. It states it will "enhance public confidence in the integrity of the electoral system;". My problem here is that all of the sections that this clause introduces fail to deliver that purpose. Why do they fail to deliver that purpose? Well I ask you this: how can the public have confidence in the integrity of our electoral system if in effect—and just to be clear I'm not talking about the semantics of the wording—this bill allows a party leader to dismiss an MP at their will? How can the public possibly have confidence in the integrity of our electoral system?The reason it does that is that one only a party leader can notify the Speaker that a member has been deemed to have left the party and two the party leader only has to state that they have the support of 66 percent of their caucus. Now there are two things wrong with that. One is that they only need to make the statement but the second one is that effectively that turns that whole question into a question of the party leadership. Now if a caucus is faced with "Back your leader and agree to dismiss a member or vote the leader down." then that is simply a test of confidence in the leader. It is simply saying either "I'm voting to continue with the leader I have." or "I'm voting to remove them." So in reality while in the past it is true that there have been leaders that haven't been able to muster the support of enough of their colleagues to do much at all—and the previous Labour leader is a good example of that—in most cases leaders will have no problem in having the support of their caucus because they already have it. To not give it to them on that question would call into question the continuance of that leader so the reality is the leader will be able to make the decision. They know they will get the support of caucus.Then again another part which fundamentally undermines the concept that the public would have integrity in the system under this model is the requirement only that they state certain things as holding true. They don't need to provide evidence for instance that the party's constitutional rules have been met in going through the process to work through the decision to expel the member; they merely must state that they have done so. In this House it is true that we accept members' words but the test here is not what members of this House are prepared to accept; the test here is what the public would think. In this instance I would say that the public would want to see more evidence than a simple statement from a leader that the rules have actually been followed."