Zoe Daniel (Goldstein, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to oppose the suspension. I would argue that there's no need to change the arrangements for debate of the 'closing loopholes' legislation. We could have sat last week. We didn't. As the member for North Sydney has already said, the Senate committee scrutinising the bill won't report until February. In all likelihood, the bill that then comes back from the Senate will be substantially different from the legislation we're debating today in the House, and some of its measures indeed would not take effect until the end of 2025. So, in short, we have time. It doesn't matter whether the rest of the omnibus legislation passes this House after parliament returns in the New Year.

The crossbench offered the government the opportunity to deal with the measures that are universally regarded as urgent. Not only was that offer rejected; the government wasted an afternoon of the House's time using standing orders to reject those proposals one by one, and then to consign them to the bottom of the Notice Paper. The only really substantive point that the Leader of the House made during the hours of debate yesterday was this: why just these four measures, when there are other matters that make a difference to people's lives? And then the Leader of the House evidenced industrial manslaughter. I would support that being brought forward. And I suspect the crossbench in the Senate and the House would do so, too. So to the minister I say: if there are urgent measures, bring them on. The minister might also discover it's the same story with other elements of the bill—the amendments on casuals and permanent shifts, for example—now that he's won the support of some key employer organisations. So talking to the House today about a shortage of time, when there has been an opportunity to deal with these issues in an orderly way, I think is a bit rich.

I do welcome the opportunities that the minister has given me and the crossbench, and also staff, to discuss this legislation. But, in saying that, the government has known for months that the crossbench had deep reservations about the consequences of some sections of this enormous bill—a couple of hundred pages long and with a several-hundred-pages-long explanatory memorandum—involving significant changes to our industrial relations system. I've told the minister this directly. I've appealed to him personally to deal with the uncontentious parts of the legislation first. The government's critical of the employer organisations, which have simply thrown up their hands and declared the bill should be rejected holus-bolus. The crossbench is not aiming to do that. The minister can't have it both ways. The crossbench has offered a way to deal with all the measures in the bill in a methodical manner, taking the uncontentious issues first.

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