Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I say to the member for Riverina: there is an improvement in terms of committee reports. I acknowledge that the member for Riverina chaired a very important committee in the last parliament. You can be in this parliament on a Friday tabling your report and you will still get the same five minutes a side for the report, but at 10 o’clock in the Main Committee all your committee members who serve with you can have another 15 minutes—and you can as well. All those backbench members who serve tirelessly on parliamentary committees trying to bring reform and change, who listen during their parliamentary committee work to the people of Australia out there in voter land, can get 15 minutes on the reports. You know what? Under these reforms, almost contemporaneously with the report tabling, those members who are not chairs or deputy chairs can be in the Main Committee for at least 15 minutes talking about the report, talking about the recommendations, talking about why they are so important either for their constituents or for Australia as a whole. I think that this is a welcome move.

Do you think that the opposition have a good track record when it comes to giving breaks for backbenchers? Of course not. The most significant reform in recent time was the establishment of the Main Committee—and guess what: the opposition of the day bitterly opposed it. It was damnation! It was ruination! Democracy was utterly going to collapse! And you know what? In the UK they thought it was such a good idea that the ‘mother parliament’ has got Westminster Hall. It is an exact copy of the Main Committee, which the coalition so bitterly opposed as a ‘damnation of democracy’ here in Australia.

I am quite unashamed. I want to say on the public record to the Leader of the House that I think that this is an important reform. And like the Howard government previously and people like the member for McPherson, who chaired the Procedure Committee—as with all new arrangements, new changes—we will have a look at it in the Procedure Committee and see how well and effectively it is working. But do not come into the parliament and say, ‘Backbench members are getting less opportunity; they are being denied opportunity,’ or give some cock-and-bull story about there being less accountability because of these changes to devote a special day to private members, or say that somehow these arrangements are going to absolutely abolish the need to have a quorum at the start of the parliament on Friday, that no-one can be here and the Speaker can be forced to commence the proceedings. You just do not understand what is being proposed and, more importantly, you are misunderstanding the benefits that backbenchers on this side of the House—and, I might say, backbenchers on that side of the House and the occasional shadow minister—are going to gain from these changes.

The last point I would like to talk about is the proposal regarding nursing mothers. Please understand that there was an agreement on this issue between the chief whips in the last parliament. This does not exactly reflect that agreement because we use the term ‘lactating mothers’. That is the only difference in the motion being proposed, with one exception. Again, I give credit to the honourable member for Riverina: she requested it. I thought it was a reasonable proposition and the Leader of the House agreed. We have a statement that it will not be used as a precedent for any other situation. It is a system that utterly depends on the honour of the Chief Opposition Whip and me. If we lack honesty and we lack integrity then it will fail.

But I want to make this point: no woman in the parliament, on either side, has approached me and said that we need this provision—not one. There has been no committee of women who thought it up and said that we need to do it. But it is about time that the parliament understood that, increasingly, young women are coming into this parliament wanting to combine their careers as parliamentarians and mothers and, indeed, the joy of having a child. The old men’s club has to wake up at some point and understand that the rules need to change. We may never need this provision in this parliament, it might never be utilised, but we are drawing a line in the sand and saying that, bit by bit, we are going to change and acknowledge the fact that, increasingly, we have women members. We have 11 women members in the new class of 2007 and, over time, we will have even more women coming into parliament. We need to start taking that into account and make changes to make this a more family-friendly parliament and acknowledge the younger members, including women, who are coming into parliament.

If I had listened to the opposition and believed all they said, I do not know how I could possibly vote for these proposals. I think the opposition has completely misunderstood the intent and purpose of the proposals. There is always the safety factor that the Procedure Committee will review them, finetune them and make changes. Can I put something on the table and say that I would be very happy if the Procedure Committee looked at, for example, a standard finishing time of eight o’clock on Mondays, Tuesdays and Wednesdays. Will that happen? I do not know. But I sincerely hope that the Procedure Committee, when it is established—if we can ever establish it tonight—might get a chance to review these new arrangements and come up with appropriate recommendations.

See this speech in context