Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I find it interesting that the member for Sturt is squealing about the lack of notice in relation to these amendments when it was actually commonplace for his government to bring on substantive bills with a lack of notice. When we were in opposition, the then government used to drop those bills—some hundreds of pages of bills—on the opposition with minimum notice. I will quote some examples: you had the Tampa legislation, you had the intervention in the Northern Territory, you had the terrorism bills and you had the ASIO bills. These were substantive pieces of legislation.

What we have here is the government saying to the opposition that we agree now with the amendments that the Senate has proposed but there are some technical deficiencies in those amendments. We have redrafted those amendments so that they reflect the will of the Senate. The interesting thing is that Senator Ronaldson, the shadow minister, is in the chamber, in the advisers box. The committee which I chair, the Joint Standing Committee on Electoral Matters, took a much harder line than the position that is currently proposed by the Senate because we wanted to pare it all back to the previous position in relation to tax deductibility. We wanted to go further than this. But the minority report of the Liberal senators went nowhere near this in relation to holding the line that they are holding at the moment. The only comments they made were about anonymous donations. They suggested that our committee report be amended from what we were recommending, which was a $50 cap on anonymous donations, to $250. Their attitude was: ‘Let’s have this bill dealt with so that it includes all other amendments in relation to electoral matters—political donations and the like. Let’s do it all together.’ So it is a bit rich for them to be claiming foul, that what they have got is late notice of technical amendments.

The truth is that they should take the government on trust. They still have until the matter goes back before the Senate to expose whether or not these amendments live up to what we are saying. If the amendments the government have now proposed do not live up to what we are saying, then you have the numbers in the Senate to further insist on your old amendments. That is where you have got time to check and test and say, ‘The government have deceived us.’ I think what you will find is that the government have not deceived you at all. What the government have done is tidy up what the Senate was proposing. I am not critical of the Senate. The Senate makes a lot of amendments to government bills. Frankly, in terms of resources, occasionally its drafting does need to be further clarified. What I am saying to the opposition is: take us on trust. You have between now and when the Senate considers the matter to then say—

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