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

You have been very generous but let me say, getting back to the motion that is before the House, the motion before the House intends to extend sitting hours on 11 October to allow the House to sit from 9 am till 2 pm. We will support such an amendment but in doing so it is perfectly reasonable for us to make the political points that need to be made: No. 1, we should not be in this House even debating this legislation and No. 2, the government could have kept to the regular process for dealing with legislation in this House. They should not have needed to add sitting hours because they should not have gagged the debate in the first place. If there were no gag attached to this legislation, we would be able to deal with it in the normal course of events.

There is so much time on the schedule that the government placed before the parliament at the beginning of this year because the government has virtually no agenda. The government puts very little legislation into this parliament of any consequence and this is some of the most important legislation that they have ever put into the parliament. It is fair to say that this is a package of legislation that does have consequences. For that very reason it is the one package of legislation for which no gag motion should ever have been moved. There are many other pieces of legislation that this government have introduced which they trumpet as indicating that they are able to manage the House and pass legislation. But the one package of legislation that matters, the broken promise on the carbon tax, they chose to guillotine, to gag, to apply the order where the debate will finish at a specific time. That is why we should not need to have extra sitting hours because, if there had not been a gag, we would have been able to sit through the next sitting week and potentially the week after that and debate the carbon tax.

In fact, it is the opposition's contention that, if the government were worth its salt, it would have put this legislation on the table. It would have allowed it to go to the specialist committees of the House. They would have reported and then the debate could have begun. Let us not forget, Madam Deputy Speaker, and I am sure you have not, that the carbon tax is not due to begin until 1 July 2012. It is not due to begin until the middle of next year. There is only one reason that the government wants this legislation passed by applying the gag motion on 11 and 12 October and that is because it wants it off the agenda by the end of this year. Some people—I am not one of them—think it is because it wants to get the carbon tax through before it changes the Prime Minister, before it changes the leader of the Labor Party back to the member for Griffith. Now I would not say that but some people have said that—

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