Mr WOLAHAN (Menzies) (16:06): Thank you to all the speakers who have come before me. We may never again in this parliament, certainly, and however long we're here, have an MPI after a referendum. I think we can agree that it's going to be a long time before we have one again. So it's right and proper that we discuss it in this place. Those opposite may not like the words of the motion, but I thought that maybe in their party room or in other places within this building they would be having these conversations. If they're not then I suggest that they do, because four out of five of their own seats had a different view to theirs. That's fine; that's okay. I remember when I expressed my view quite early on that many of them and their supporters said, 'Be careful, Wolahan, be careful; you're out of touch with your electorate.' That's not a fair thing to say to anyone and I won't say it to them. All of us owe three things to our constituencies: we owe our best efforts, our selfless judgement and our honest belief. And if our honest belief is different to that of others, particularly on a referendum, then that is okay. What are people asking us to do? To be dishonest? To be a follower and not lead? I'm sure that those opposite passionately believed in this, and I commend them for it. People on our side, like my friend the member for Bass, passionately believed in it, and I commend her for it. That's all we owe our electorates. But we have to ask: 'How, when the idea was presented, did the goodwill of this nation go from close to 70 per cent in the polls to 38? How did that happen?' If you have not taken the Australian people on this issue, we need you to take them on important issues of national security and economics. Of course we want to hold you to account and of course we want to be over there one day. But we also need you to succeed in the national interest. You embrace the moments when people on our side cross the floor or speak out against our own party; there are politics and theatre in that. None of you do that, and if you did you'd be kicked out. Maybe that extreme discipline you have within your own party doesn't help you all the time. The DEPUTY SPEAKER ( Ms Claydon ): You may wish to direct your comments through the Chair. Mr WOLAHAN: Yes, I acknowledge that, Deputy Speaker Claydon. Maybe that discipline doesn't help all the time, and perhaps this is the time for some honest reflection about what went wrong. We've heard commentators give the various reasons why people voted as they did. They're pretty clear, and there are four of them. The first was about division. There is value in our common humanity and dignity, and those were expressed in various different ways, like, 'Don't divide us on ancestry,' or, 'Don't divide us on race'. None of us likes the word 'race'; it's an outdated term. But that make sense to people. It makes sense to people that no-one is inferior and no-one is superior. The argument that there was a difference between race, indigeneity and an ancestry—it was a distinction without a difference. It just was. That wasn't misinformation or disinformation. It was a distinction without a difference. On detail: the detail mattered, and there's a good comparison. You can go to the 1999 referendum and say, 'For tactical reasons, don't put a bill before people because they'll split.' But you could also go to the same-sex marriage plebiscite, where a bill was on offer and where people looked at it and said, 'I actually like what I see.' If there was a bill sitting somewhere in this building on a G drive, it would have been constructive for the Australian people to have seen it and it would have been constructive for the joint select committee to have compared it to the model that was on offer. Maybe it wasn't going to match. Maybe it wasn't fit for purpose. That would have been helpful. In terms of legal risk, all of the legal experts agreed that the scope was extremely broad. They disagreed on the likelihood of risk, but they agreed on the consequences of risk. I think maybe that was a key turning point where, in the joint select committee, we could have properly sought to address that risk where there was disagreement, instead of having a ticking exercise where you say, 'It's good to go.' That's not how the law works. That's why the High Court has seven positions. They often split four to three. Former chief justice French and former justice Hayne have often been in the minority and been just as passionate with their view. I think it was a mistake to have sat in the committee and to just have accepted that as a given. That's why we have courts of appeal. Law is about disagreeing and getting to the truth. Finally, I'll say this: our Constitution is a structure of our democracy. It's not where we solve problems. We can still solve these problems here and in other places, and let's do it.