Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Who would have thought that after four years of hearing those opposite constantly suspend standing orders so they could talk about carbon pricing they would now bring a motion to this House to suspend standing orders, to shut down debate about pricing carbon, to shut down debate about there being a limit on pollution. That is exactly what the resolution in front of us does. It is not there to manage debate, as the Leader of the House kept referring to—as a debate management motion. It is here to shut down debate. It is here to prevent debate and to gag debate, to make sure that the long list of people who have put their names forward wanting to speak on this debate are denied the chance to do so.

There was an interesting claim from the Leader of the House. He said that there are not many names on the list as to how many people want to speak on this. He did not read the final thing that the whips put on there which says, 'More names are available and will be added.' That is the normal practice of the whips. The fact is that what the Leader of the House is saying is that after an entire election campaign where they claimed and their members claimed that they wanted to come into this House and talk about this issue they are going to deny that opportunity, and deny the members on this side the opportunity to even contribute to the debate. Where is the urgency in this? The Prime Minister himself went to business and said he did not believe these bills were about to be carried. The Prime Minister would have an impact. Yet the manager of government business, the Leader of the House, flatly refuses to allow members of this House to even be able to put their views on the record. This is not an ordinary way of managing debate in any way, shape or form.

Go through the sorts of ideas that the Leader of the House has put forward—and we respect that he is new to the job—but he has put forward that all non-government amendments will be voted on as one. So if we have a circumstance where there are members of the crossbench who put forward amendments to the same clause that are different to the amendments put forward by the opposition, we will vote on those amendments as one block. We actually have a situation where the government have put forward a resolution where contradictory amendments get voted on together. It is absolutely procedurally impossible for that to be implemented.

We have a motion from the person who is meant to lead debate in this House which, if followed through, will create a possibility within this House that we get contradictory amendments to the same bill at the exact same moment. We have had situations previously where debate has been sought to be managed and where it has sought to be managed in the ordinary event it happens which is after there has been a long and protracted debate, not as we have today where it is being gagged after only one person has spoken. We have only had one speech on these bills.

We have a circumstance at the moment where the other place is not even meeting yet we have this strange cry for urgency from the Leader of the House. He is wanting to do one thing and one thing only—that is, shut the debate down. But he is doing so in a way that procedurally makes a farce of the entire debate here. How can we have a circumstance where the House is dealing with a resolution which, if carried, says contradictory amendments will be dealt with in the same vote? How do you do that? How do you have a circumstance where the same clause gets amended in two different ways simultaneously? How does the House actually deal with that? I went through Practice and, unsurprisingly, there is no precedent for this because, unsurprisingly, no-one has ever attempted something as absurd as what the Leader of the House has just brought forward. No-one has ever tried to have contradictory amendments dealt with in the same breath. Yet that is how we are meant to deal with this—on crazy urgency but something that the Prime Minister has said is not going to be dealt with until mid next year.

There is one reason that the Leader of the House would want to shut down debate and that is the embarrassment of carrying forward an argument that no economists agree with, that no scientists agree with—and I would love to see what was in the Minister for the Environment's incoming government brief—and that they know no sensible advice can say has merit as an argument. And when you are dealt with a circumstance where everywhere you look the policy does not have merit, what is the one option open to you? Shut down the debate altogether. Shut down the debate, shut down the argument and shut down the opportunity for members of this parliament, including members on each side, who ran this argument and ran it hard during the election campaign, even to put their views on the table.

The Leader of the House has already wasted no time in moving the gag, in preventing members from speaking and in preventing—

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