Annabel Crabb: 'The senate reform is a heady mix of sabotage and self-interest.'

By Annabel Crabb.

All this week we’ve watched our senators fight tooth and nail over the proposed electoral reforms. It’s fair to say a more frightening hellscape of passive aggression is yet to be identified, writes Annabel Crabb.

For days now, and with all the fervour of a drunk at a bus stop, the Senate has been arguing with itself about its own fate.

Even allowing for Canberra’s established tendency to self-absorption, it’s been quite the spectacle: 76 senators fighting tooth and nail on the question of how senators should be chosen in future.

In ordinary life, of course, decision-makers with such a Taj Mahal-sized personal conflict of interest in an issue would be obliged to recuse themselves.

But the Senate is the Senate, and it’s kind of pointless without senators.

And so it’s lurched along.

The Government wants Senate voting preferences to be directed by voters, and only by voters. It would like to do away with the amusing existing system, in which parties fight among themselves, lodge preference allocation forms with the Australian Electoral Commission and then watch the chocolate wheel spin.

The level of individual senatorial enthusiasm for the Government's proposition tends to vary in inverse proportion to the proportion of the primary vote enjoyed by the senator in question at the time of their most recent engagement with the electoral process.

Easily the most hotly opposed is Senator Ricky Muir of Victoria, who was elected in 2013 on just 0.51 per cent of the vote.

(Not all the minority senators are opposed; Jacqui Lambie of Tasmania is relaxed about the reforms, for instance, although one should recall that Senator Lambie is from Tasmania, the easiest place in Australia to get elected to the Upper House, and the only state where "Running for the Senate" constitutes an official skilled migration channel.)

The Greens are supporting the Government. Words you aren't called upon to type much, post-2013.

And the Labor Party, having made supportive noises in the past, is now mildly opposed, and reclining to watch the proceedings with popcorn and a suitable beverage.

The fascinating thing about the debate this week is that the proximity of existential threat has driven some senators to mad displays of strategic cunning; a sort of parliamentary Eisteddfod of legislative guile.

Muir sought to bring on the Government's Australian Building and Construction Commission legislation instead. This is the Bill the Government desperately wants to have passed, but equally also desperately wants to have rejected by the Senate so that it can have the opportunity to go to a double dissolution election using posters of Opposition leader Bill Shorten looking morally porous in a union bomber jacket.

Explained in forty seconds: The Senate voting reforms unveiled today by Prime Minister @TurnbullMalcolm | @AuSenatehttps://t.co/CQKp0PcCIz

— ABC News (@abcnews) February 22, 2016

Muir himself passionately opposes the legislation. The only reason he sought to bring it on was so the Government would look opportunistic and venal for voting not to have a debate on its own bill.

This is the Senate, people. A more frightening hellscape of passive aggression is yet to be identified.

Simultaneously, another opponent of the Senate reforms - David Leyonhjelm, a charming maniac who was elected in 2013 when his party, the Liberal Democrats, miraculously drew the first spot on the NSW Senate voting bedsheet and instantly won the vote of many Liberals who weren't paying close attention - sought to distract the Greens by moving to start the Senate's debate on same-sex marriage.

This is a cruelly brilliant tactic, seeing that there is nothing, in the ordinary course of events, that any Green Senator - or any Green anywhere, for that matter - would rather do than have a debate about same-sex marriage. I have met Greens who would interrupt their own same-sex marriage in order to have a debate about same-sex marriage. And yet, they resisted.

Leyonhjelm's tactic is at least allied with his personal belief; he supports the removal of same-sex marriage prohibitions. But his scorn for the Greens - who staidly refused to take the bait - chimed in nicely with the approach of the Labor Party, which celebrates diversity by having variable historical positions on both Senate reform and gay marriage, but these days takes a hard line on disapproving of the Greens.

Labor Senator Sam Dastyari authored Labor's formal response to the Senate reform proposal, which went light on opposing the actual reforms, but heavy on them going too fast, and involving the Greens.

Yesterday, Senator Dastyari - a man of reliable enthusiasm - restricted himself to uncontroversial territory, focusing his attack on Greens leader Richard di Natale's recent appearance in GQ magazine clad in a top-of-the-range black skivvy.

"I speak from experience here; you have to draw the line somewhere. This is coming from a bloke who did a re-enactment of a mobile phone on the ABC," Senator Dastyari said.

"When I say 'are you crazy for doing a GQ fashion shoot dressed up as the cat burglar and pretend you support progressive values and progressive politics', then you know you've gone too far."

This is the intractable element of Senate reform. You can take the Senator out of the Senate, but you can't take the Senate out of the Senator.

Annabel Crabb writes for The Drum and is the presenter of Kitchen Cabinet. She tweets at @annabelcrabb.

This post originally appeared on the ABC.

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