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

They won't have. Look at the list. Every time we deal with a bill with substantive legislation—in this entire year we are yet to have a piece of legislation where we have had a division on the second reading. Everything that has been in front of us has been the ordinary business of government that is thrown up by the departments each year and that both sides of politics agree has to happen, but in terms of a government with a plan or with some sort of agenda there's nothing. When they want to change even the agenda of the day in parliament they don't even bother to give the minister a speech to say, 'Here's why.' I don't blame the member of the executive at the table; it's not his job to choose all the words. Someone should have given you something you could have read out on why we're delaying dealing with multinational tax avoidance. It's a serious thing to put off. It's a serious decision of the parliament to decide that multinational tax avoidance won't be dealt with today. We had Monday where we dealt all day—all day—with whether or not we would pay bills that everybody agrees have to be paid. We had Tuesday where we dealt—all day—with whether or not we would pay bills that everybody agrees have to be paid. In the first half of today we dealt with whether or not we would pay bills that automatically have to be paid. We spent the debate for the entirety of last week—

Mr Falinski interjecting—

You know you've been warned. You know there's probably a vote coming up. Can I encourage you to keep interjecting on me? I'd love it. I shouldn't have told him that, Deputy Speaker Claydon. That one's on me. But, after all of last week, where once again we were not dealing with substantive legislation, where the question before the chair was whether or not appropriations should be paid, the government now gets to, first, an education bill where the only controversial issue on it, in terms of whether the bill will be supported or not, was whether the third reading should take place today or tomorrow. That was the only issue.

Today, though, we now have legislation that deals with multinational tax avoidance and no-one from the government can tell us why they're putting it off. No-one from the government can tell us why it's been delayed. Some in the government had aspirations as to what they'd do when they became members of parliament. What happens when you get here? You discover your main job is to vote that the Leader of the Opposition be no further heard. There's an achievement. All those thoughts and policy ideas that came to you from constituents—all those people who would have gone to every one of you saying, 'Can't we do something about multinational tax avoidance?'—you find out now you're going to vote to put it off, and you don't even have a government that will tell you why.

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