Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

The Leader of the House has made a paltry argument for why we should extend sitting hours, but what he has underlined is the government's mishandling of the debate management of the carbon tax bills from start to finish. In their desperation to ram these bills through the House, on Tuesday the parliament passed, at the recommendation of the Leader of the House, a guillotine motion to cut off debate in the next sitting fortnight so that the government could ram these bills through the parliament. At the same time the government established a joint select committee to look into the clean energy legislation, the carbon tax package of bills—19 bills of over 1,000 pages—and has given each member one minute per bill in order to be able to debate the biggest structural change to our economy since Federation.

Now the government comes into the House, having applied the gag, and decides to extend sitting hours. Obviously the opposition welcomes the opportunity to debate the carbon tax bills at greater length. Of course we do. We want to scrutinise the carbon tax legislation, but how absurd to be extending sitting hours next Tuesday morning when the committee that has been established by the House is not reporting until 7 October. If the government was genuine about scrutiny, accountability and transparency and if the Greens and the crossbenchers genuinely believed that this government needed to be held to account, that they were interested in honesty, open government and transparency, why on earth would we be extending sitting hours before the inquiry into these bills is handed down on 7 October. Surely, if the government was genuine about transparency and scrutiny they would extend the sitting hours after the committee hands down its report and remove the gag motion they passed on Tuesday in order to give the parliament as much time as we, the elected members, want in order to be able to scrutinise this legislation.

Just to underline how rank this government is in terms of its treatment of the parliament and the contempt in which it holds Australian democracy, the consideration-in-detail stage on 19 pieces of legislation, of over 1,000 pages, is three hours. Three hours in two weeks. For three hours the entire parliament will get the opportunity to question the minister about the detail involved in this legislation in 19 separate bills of over 1,000 pages. That does not include the explanatory memorandums to the bills. The government clearly with their alliance partners, the Greens and the crossbenchers, have decided to force through this legislation and, in order to create a fig leaf of respectability and a pretence that they take the parliament seriously, they plan to extend sitting hours by a few hours next Tuesday morning.

The most important point to make is that this legislation has no mandate in any event. This is an illegitimate piece of legislation that has not been through an election. The government have never sought a mandate for it. In fact, the very opposite occurred in the last election. They got a non-mandate.

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