Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

There was the opportunity for the government to not put this motion at the moment but to allow the first speeches to take place and then for us to have this debate immediately following the first speeches. This decision of the Leader of the House surprises me—that we are to delay the first speeches to try to have the debate right now to silence the rest of the parliament. Let us not forget the motion that is in front of us. It does not merely refer to the mining tax. It also refers to item after item of expenditure, including the schoolkids bonus, which they are now wanting to make sure is shut down, abolished, almost without debate at all. There are times when you get what the Leader of the House so euphemistically calls 'a debate management motion'. It is a motion designed to prevent members of parliament from being heard. Some of his predecessors have moved motions—not as clumsy as this—to limit debate after the parliamentary debate has been going for some time and they feel they need to bring the issue to a close.

On this occasion, the Leader of the House has done something new. He is actually moving that we gag the debate before the debate has commenced. The only view that has been heard in this parliament so far is the view of the minister who has moved it. Not one dissenting voice has been allowed to be heard on this issue so far, and already the Leader of the House has decided: that is just too much dissent. Already the Leader of the House has decided that the objections of the parliament and different voices have been heard for far too long for his liking. So we have the situation now where we find ourselves debating the gagging of debate as often as we find ourselves dealing with any motion of substance from this Leader of the House. We have a circumstance where, of the three issues that they first wanted to raise in this parliament—the debt ceiling, the mining tax and carbon pricing and limiting pollution—they have gagged debate on all three. On all three they have chosen to gag debate, on all three they have decided that the confidence of their own arguments just is not there, and they have decided that they would rather silence the parliament than participate in it. But they do so again with the Leader of the House bringing forward the most clumsy resolution you could imagine. Even though the effort was made to help him when we last debated the gag with respect to carbon pricing, he has again come forward, on this occasion under (2)(b), where one question will be put on any amendments which have been moved by non-government members. This House has no way of dealing with contradictory amendments at the same time. But once again the Leader of the House is to put this parliament in a circumstance where if more than one non-government member moves an amendment to the same clause then both of those amendments get voted on simultaneously. And if both were to be carried then we have a circumstance where there is no precedent anywhere in the Westminster system for how you then deal with two simultaneous amendments to the same bill.

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