Singing helps with day job of trying to keep taxes low

Parliament's dirty little secret is that lots of badly drafted legislation becomes law. Last week, the Senate quietly amended some terrible legislation from 2012 which made it legal for ships to dump oil in some parts of the ocean around Australia and not others, defined the wrong things as being dangerous, and introduced requirements that are impossible to enforce. It even directed readers to section 10(3) for a definition of a domestic shipping voyage, despite the fact that section 10(3) does not exist.

This demonstrates that even when governments don't intend legislation to be bad, it can still wind up that way. In this case, the cause is almost certainly that nobody bothered to read it properly before passing it.

Such legislation passes into law without much debate or proper scrutiny every sitting week. My suggestion to my fellow legislators is, if you can't be bothered to read legislation, we probably don't need it.

I proposed – alone in the Chamber – that we keep this bad legislation as a monument, to remind us of the terrible laws that pass through it. Of course, none of this made the news, because the passing of bad laws is routine. It's just not part of anybody's narrative, and not part of the game.