Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Speaker, this will be a bit of an anticlimax, but I should adjust my cuffs and straighten my tie—Stephen, there is nothing I can do with my hair, but anyway—and raise this because I think that it is an important development in the way in which this place operates. So by way of questions to you under standing order 103: does the Speaker agree that the efforts of officers from the Department of the House of Representatives and the Department of Parliamentary Services at short notice and which enabled members and senators to carry out their business last night unhindered, whilst at the same time allowing members of the press gallery to appropriately give public coverage to the historic events, were exemplary? Will the Speaker convey, both to departmental officials and to the executive of the gallery, the gratitude of the House for the development of protocols to handle such events both cooperatively and to the satisfaction of the interests of all concerned?

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