Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Leader of the House interjects and says that there are no more speakers. Exactly. Why are there no more speakers? Why were there members willing to put their hand up to say that they wanted to speak but are now not going to speak?

This is an outrageous way to conduct this parliament about such an important piece of legislation. The government introduced the bill yesterday and brought it on today. Usually you would wait longer than that, because that is what the standing orders require to give members of this place time to read the bill and consult with their communities. To now have a backdoor arrangement that sees this bill progressing through at 12.30 pm when it was brought in here first thing this morning is an insult to the way this place is meant to operate.

There are 150 people who sit in this chamber. Those 150 people have diverse communities and many of those communities have different interests. We deserve the time to be able to talk to those communities about what is in this bill before we decide our final position on it. Instead, we are moving to the third reading straight away. The government is saying, 'Let's get this through here.' The government is saying, 'Let's get this through this place today before question time.' Well I am not having a bar of it and I am very disappointed that the opposition are having a bar of it.

This bill should not be proceeding through this place today. The ordinary process would be that it comes back in the next sitting week. The Leader of the House knows that and the Manager of Opposition Business knows that. By pulling speakers off the list and by moving to the third reading straight away the normal processes of this House are being abused and we are proceeding to a vote the day after the bill was introduced, and that almost never happens in this place. So everything we heard this morning about standing up to the government and demanding proper process counts for naught, because this bill will go through. This bill will just go through because the old parties have agreed on it.

I cannot recall any other recent time where there has been an agreement to stop the full debate of a bill. Other members of the crossbench saw this bill yesterday. Not everyone in this country votes for Labor or Liberal. Not everyone sitting in this chamber is a member of the Labor, Liberal or National parties. Members of the crossbench got this bill yesterday. In the ordinary way this place operates, the members of the crossbench would not be asked to come back and debate it today. They would have a few sitting days to go and consider a bill and consider their position on it, which means we would come back next sitting week. This government, with the opposition's support, has denied them that opportunity. You have said: 'Well, we've got the numbers. It doesn't matter what members of the parliament say. We've got the numbers, so we're just going to push it through.'

You are doing it in a way that means people cannot even go back to their communities, find out what their communities think, and then come back here and report on it. They may have come back and supported the bill. The Greens may have come back and supported the bill, because it might be the right mechanism in response to the Federal Court decision. But to say that we do not even have the chance to go away and read it sets a very dangerous precedent indeed. For Labor and Liberal to gang up and say they are going to use their numbers to introduce a bill one day and then pass it the next so that no-one even has the time to read it, let alone get advice on it, is a very dangerous precedent for this place.

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