Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Climate Change and Energy) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Speaker. The Leader of the House famously said some years ago that the convention has always been that the bill should be introduced and then debated the following sitting week, not the next day. Apparently, debate the next day was some abuse of process in this House! But he's gone even further: he is not only debating the bill tomorrow; he wants to debate this extraordinary Venezuelan-style intervention in a market only a couple of hours after we have been presented with an explanatory memorandum that runs to more than 100 pages. We asked for a briefing on this bill last Monday and got crickets from the other side—from the Treasurer and from the new energy minister. There was no attempt at all to engage with the opposition in providing us with the level of detail all members of parliament deserve when considering a piece of legislation as significant as this Venezuelan neo-Marxist form of market intervention by the so-called Liberal government.

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