Joe Hockey (North Sydney, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Hansard source

I hear the interjection from the Chief Opposition Whip, who was the architect of ‘farcical Fridays’ in an attempt to try and play a rather cute political game where ministers and the Prime Minister would not have to attend on a Friday and could therefore travel around the country visiting the electorates of members of the opposition who were in the parliament doing the yards making a difference for their constituents.

Without going through the entire history of the standing orders of the parliament, which I will save everyone from, I will say this: these were ill thought through changes to the standing orders. Without the decisive action of the opposition, there would have been a failure to recognise that the standing orders set up by the engineer of Friday sittings, the Leader of the House, would not have been constitutional. It is not in compliance with section 39 of the Constitution to hold Friday sittings without a quorum. How absurd it was to have actual sittings where a quorum is called and the parliament itself is not the quorum, and where a Speaker, as you quite correctly identified, Madam Deputy Speaker Burke, is unable to establish that there is a quorum in the chamber. Section 39 of the Constitution is explicit in the demand by the founding fathers that the parliament have a set quorum in order to be able to sit; yet, through rather cute mechanisms, the government, in a very naive and obviously unlawful way, tried to establish new standing orders that would prevent the establishment of a quorum.

It is also the case—and we saw it quite vividly on Tuesday when the delayed divisions were held in quite extraordinary circumstances—that, because those divisions had been poorly thought through, the government had to bring forward the sitting on Tuesday by one hour to allow for outstanding divisions to be counted. We saw only too obviously those divisions become a farce in themselves because, even though the member for Moncrieff, who is in the chamber, and the member for Cowper respected the Speaker’s decision for them to leave the chamber for 24 hours, there was a further vote on the next sitting day to uphold the naming of those members, and they were suspended for a further 24 hours. Had they openly defied the Speaker and refused to leave the chamber—and you were in the chair, Madam Deputy Speaker, so you know it—you would have had to close down the chamber because the Speaker would have been unable to enforce the Speaker’s decision. If the member for Moncrieff and the member for Cowper had not left the chamber, we would have quite graphically understood that there could be a total humiliation of the Speaker rather than just a partial humiliation of the Speaker.

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