If you're wondering why this kind of thing happens all the time in Australia, the late Donald Horne summed it up beautifully in the 1960s:
"Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck" [1]
Australia has many intelligent, brilliant people. For some reason, the design of our political system results in almost none of them getting into Government. This awful, fundamentally flawed law (literally only passed into law because our opposition was terrified of being called "soft on crime" in the media over Christmas) is just one in a long line of disappointments.