Paul Fletcher (Bradfield, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Government Services and the Digital Economy) Share this | Hansard source

I move, as an amendment to the motion moved by the minister:

That paragraph (8) be omitted.

I want to explain why the opposition is doing this. The Leader of the House is proposing a number of things in this motion. The first is that we have some late nights to consider the omnibus fair work amendment, and the opposition has no problem with that. We're here to consider and debate legislation. I won't respond to the Leader of the House's attempt to attribute responsibility for this motion to others; the Leader of the House and the government have the numbers, and the Leader of the House is fully responsible for what happens in this House.

He's also responsible for paragraph (8) of this motion that has been moved. The effect of paragraph (8) is that there will be only 20 minutes of consideration-in-detail debate on each set of amendments. The government is seeking to crunch down the time for consideration in detail to stymie the meaningful work of this House and its members in considering and debating amendments and, indeed, the detail of the legislation line by line.

The Leader of the House has spoken about the second reading debate, which of course continues. That will see a series of government MPs repeating talking points about this government's so-called 'closing loopholes' bill. What he has sought to do at the same time is to crunch down—to minimise—the time allocated to this House to do its actual meaningful work which occurs during the consideration in detail process. Sadly, this is part of a pattern we have seen from this government and from this minister in the way that he and it have sought to deal with this closing the loopholes bill. This government fought tooth and nail against there being a proper Senate inquiry into this bill, which runs for hundreds of pages. Notoriously, the bill was introduced and there was little time to consider it before the second reading debate resumed—a timing that was quite different to the orthodox way in which bills progress in this House.

What's being proposed here seeks to gut, effectively, the normal operations of the consideration in detail process. Twenty minutes is a ridiculously short amount of time to allow detailed engagement on specific issues. I'd make the point that it would limit to 20 minutes each the time the crossbench members would have to engage in the consideration in detail stage of the debate. I might make the point also that the substance of what the Leader of the House is doing here is entirely at odds with his fine rhetoric during one of his many flourishes to which we were treated to yesterday. He had this to say:

I won't be cutting the speaking time, but I'm going to have to provide extra time for the House …

That's exactly what he's doing: he is cutting, in an extremely blatant way, the time available to members to engage in the consideration in detail process. That's the substance of the motion that the Leader of the House has put before the House today. That's why the opposition is moving to omit the objectionable paragraph (8), so that all members of this House—government, crossbench and opposition—have the opportunity to participate in the consideration in detail process and allow that process to work through as the standing orders contemplate, allowing this House to do its proper work.

Unfortunately, what the Leader of the House is trying to do, and what the government is trying to do, is to dramatically compress and constrain the operation of the consideration in detail stage of this debate. It's the most important part of the debate; it's the part of the debate in which any member has the opportunity to propose amendments and, of course, any member has the opportunity to ask questions of the minister. And this is on a bill, it must be said, which goes for several hundred pages and is on areas of enormous complexity. In his previous role, this Leader of the House spoke many times about the role of the House as a place of review and of scrutiny. It's the place where, on behalf of the Australian people, parliamentarians can test and scrutinise legislation being put forward by the government, including individual provisions. That's precisely what the consideration in detail process is supposed to do. And of course it's also the place where members can put forward amendments and have those debated on their merits. They can do their work to propose changes or ways in which the legislation might work more effectively.

But notwithstanding the many years of fine rhetoric on these topics that we heard from the Leader of the House in his previous role, now that he's got his hand on the levers he's not interested—not interested at all—in members of this House having the opportunity to engage in a meaningful way in what is, arguably, the most important stage of a bill going through this House. And so it's for that reason that the opposition is moving this amendment so that the consideration of detail process can happen in a meaningful fashion rather than being gutted, as the Leader of the House has sought to do.

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