Senator STOTT DESPOJA (10:14 AM) —The Australian Democrats will be supporting the two Green amendments before us for many of the reasons outlined by Senator Brown. We think it is quite an appropriate amendment to place an onus on the Prime Minister that he will act in accordance with the wishes and the recommendations of the nomination committee. The Australian Democrats appreciate that there are some already existing safeguards and provisions in the legislation which ensure that the Prime Minister has regard to the committee's recommendations, but we do not believe there are enough safeguards to ensure that the Prime Minister of the day does not simply ignore or override the will of that committee.

The nomination process was a key, I believe, to the success of this particular model in the final stages of the Constitutional Convention last year. An important ingredient of that was allowing for public input into that nomination process and ensuring that the public input was appropriately diverse and reasonably representative. That is an issue that we discussed in the joint select committee process. I am glad to see that the second recommendation of that committee was accepted. It states:

. . . Nominations Committee Bill be amended to require the Prime Minister to, as far as practicable, have regard to the diversity of the Australian people when appointing community members of the Nominations Committee.

All these factors are very important. We should have some sense of certainty in relation to the Prime Minister's actions. The previous speaker referred to some rather glib comments by the Prime Minister in a Channel 9 interview a couple of nights ago that concerned me. There is a need to ensure diversity is taken into account and that the will of the people on that committee is not overruled and ignored. Certainly, this is one way of doing that and the Democrats support it.