Senator BARTLETT (6:14 PM) —I will not delay the Senate greatly. I realise the situation with the numbers, and I do welcome at least the indication of interest, if you like, from both the coalition and the ALP and the possibility of exploring this in the upcoming inquiry of the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters. Nonetheless, I do think it is worth highlighting that, as Senator Harradine said, it is not that difficult a measure. The constitution is already provided to the Electoral Commission when a registration is first put in, so really the only extra work would be adding that to all the other details that are already required on the register, such as the name of the party and the name and address of the registered officer, et cetera.

I do not think that is overly onerous. I do not think that having one extra piece of paper added to the returns, that have to be put in every year in any case, would generate particularly enormous amounts of administrative work for the Electoral Commission, given the amount it is already required to do in assessing returns of political parties. So I do not believe it would be a major measure.

On Senator Ellison's point about the availability already of the constitutions in some states under incorporated associations law, I am not an expert on the political structure of every political party registered in the country partly because you cannot see where their constitutions are so you do not know, but I would hazard a guess that a number of parties are not incorporated in various states and I am not sure they would be necessarily available in that regard. In any case, we will pursue this through the joint select committee. In the meantime, anyone who actually wants to see the Democrats' constitution at any stage should look on our web site. We do not need to wait for this amendment to go through to show people what our constitution is.