Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

There are quite a few new members sitting in the House. We will find over time that they are more frequently absent, but this is a good opportunity to give them a little bit of advice. The first one is: whatever trick you pull on an opposition, they will pull it on you when their turn comes along. So you go ahead: pull all the tricks and toughen up this place in a way that you think is to your advantage, but do not squeal when it is your turn. Let us get that straight.

Let me talk for a moment to the member for Maribyrnong: confected laughter was a job you had to do in opposition but you are now the government, so look like a government. There is another fact that I want to draw to the attention of the member for Maribyrnong. On his first day in this place, I heard him say, ‘Could it cost $1 million to run this place for a day?’ He did not believe it—and he is shaking his head. I wonder if he knows that, on the last count made to me, 4,000 people work in this place on a sitting day. No-one should know better than him, with his constant visits to the arbitration commission, how much that costs.

It is a funny thing that the Hawke government, the Keating government, the Fraser government and the Howard government all attempted to manage the time of this place to get maximum productivity at minimum cost. I sat here on Fridays under the Hawke government. We used to go from Tuesday through to Friday and then from Monday through to Thursday. We all thought that we would stay over here for the weekend—but that did not work. They backed away from Fridays. Others have sat on Fridays and walked away from doing it. That is fine. We have said clearly that we will sit on Fridays, provided it is a real sitting day, as it used to be in those days. But when it comes to time management—this government preaches to Australians that it is going to be efficient—why have we got these sitting hours? Why do we have private members’ business on a Monday? Why do we have an agreement that private members’ business, which is often not controversial, does not require divisions or quorums? Because the government has its cabinet sitting somewhere trying to organise the future of the country and, typically, the opposition shadow cabinet is doing the same thing. That is maximising the return—private members are in here doing the things that are important to them and their constituents and the senior executives are not having their thoughts disrupted by being called down for divisions.

Also in terms of better management of the House, we always had lunchtime for an hour and a half, and we always had dinnertime for an hour and a half. In this modern environment with TV connections and everything else, someone eventually got smart and said: ‘We can sit through that. But let’s be a bit sensible. If some members are a bit fed up with the food that’s available in this place’—that is an option you will all learn about—‘they might like to go and have a meal out of this House. So let’s be fair. During that meal hour, we will agree between ourselves that we will not call quorums or divisions. In this case we will defer them. If there is a reason for them, we will go on with that procedure when everybody is back in the House.’ That is why we did that. You can count out 1½ hours or three hours a day to the additional productivity delivered in this House, while the lights were on and the airconditioning was at full pelt et cetera. That was smart.

Then we came to the conclusion that maybe we would knock off on Wednesday nights at eight o’clock just to break the pressure a little—we used to go until 11 o’clock, of course. In this place we have always had a four-day sitting week. I stand with the member for Warringah on this: I would not say of one person I have known in this House that they were lazy. You would be very silly to suggest that this is an easy job; it is not. The thing is, we said, ‘The way the flight schedules work, we have to knock off at five o’clock on Thursdays.’ So that is the sitting week. When I look at the proposal before this House and try and apply some efficiency criteria, I find that we are going to work Friday but we are not going to work until nine o’clock on Thursday. The Leader of the National Party has put the right interpretation on that: if you have to work until nine o’clock on Thursday there are no planes after that because of the curfew.

By any measure, if you are fair dinkum about what you are talking about, you should extend the sitting hours on Thursday until nine o’clock. Otherwise, you are perpetrating a fraud. If you want to be efficient and you want to get the hours in, that is how to do it. By the way, while you are about it, if you want to retain private members’ business for the convenience of everybody on Mondays, you could start at nine o’clock not 12 o’clock. No problem. You have the hours and the people should be here. What is more, you could gain an extra two hours on Tuesdays by starting government members’ business at 12 o’clock and running it until question time at two o’clock.

We propose that we will buy Fridays provided they are a full working day. In that case, most people will not get home until Saturday morning—for Western Australians and others we will not get home even then. I can cop that. I have lived that and I know how it works. I know who started it and changed it. The member for Chifley told me all about the committee and said that we opposed the proposal violently. Check the Hansard. You cannot rewrite history in this place. It is all on the record. I made a speech strongly supporting that proposal and I still think it is a good idea. So do not rewrite history in these debates. If you are going to be the government of efficiency, you do not need to turn the air conditioners and heaters up to full strength here on Fridays, because you can get the hours out of the existing sitting week. That would have been smart.

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