Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I wanted to hear the Leader of the House speak in order to hear what arguments he put. Unfortunately, he did not have any. There is a very clear point here that we need to understand. When you look at page 321 of House of Representatives Practice you see it deals with the question of the censure of a member or senator—and it deals with it specifically. When you look at that section it tells you that, apart from motions against the Leader of the Opposition, a motion of censure of a private member has only been moved on two occasions. On those two occasions, both motions were agreed to.

I think we can assume that a motion of censure against the Leader of the Opposition is, if you like, a political device to have a political debate and not necessarily a personal allegation against the Leader of the Opposition. There were only two occasions on which such motions were moved and agreed to against private members. One was against the Leader of the National Party, then in opposition, for conduct unworthy of a member. Another was a motion put to the House condemning the Leader of the National Party for reflecting on the Speaker, and the motion was withdrawn by leave after he apologised.

I only take you to those precedents, Mr Speaker, to reinforce the point that censuring or condemning a member of the House is an unbelievably unusual thing because it is an unbelievably serious thing. And because it is a serious thing, there are special ways of dealing with it under the standing orders. It is exactly, if you like, why we have different laws in the criminal arena from those in the civil arena. We make special rules to protect the rights of the accused. In the standing orders of this parliament the same approach has been taken, and special rules have been made to protect the rights of a member who is the subject of a substantive allegation.

Those rights mean that that member gets to deal with that matter by way of substantive motion and, by way of substantive motion, put their answer. The member gets an extended time for the debate and an unrestrained debate. You cannot implant that into a procedural motion and get the same result. The very fact that you cannot implant it into a procedural motion and get the same result is borne out by more than 100 years of history in this place, where chamber research has been unable to identify where a procedural motion has been used to get a substantive result other than dealing with the most basic of procedural things. The precedents you use, Mr Speaker, show that.

We have allowed those matters to come together if we have been changing the sitting times of the House, or perhaps changing the way in which we are dealing with a bill. We have never before in this parliament witnessed a day when it occurred that an individual member was under attack. We ought never to allow that to occur and it ought not to have occurred yesterday. I understand that the past is history. What we are debating now is the future. I think the best reading of yesterday’s Hansard is that there was a procedural motion moved—

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