Kevin Hogan (Page, National Party, Shadow Minister for Trade and Tourism) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in favour of the motion moved by the Manager of Opposition Business. I welcome, too, the crossbench contribution made by the previous speaker, the member for Wentworth, and the very valuable contribution she made.

To follow on from the member for Wentworth and what she was saying, there have been a lot of broken promises from this new government based on what they said before the election and what has happened after the election. We know the cost of living is one, and there have been a whole lot of others. What the member for Wentworth was touching on—and a point that I want to reinforce too—is that one of the things that the government said before the election was that they were running on themes of transparency and integrity. You heard a lot of those words before the election: 'We are going to be a government like you've never seen before. We're going to be an extremely transparent government. We're going to take integrity in government to a whole new level.'

The fact is that it is not the first time that the Manager of Opposition Business has had to move a suspension of standing orders to try and have a discussion about very serious matters in a bill. This is quite a common occurrence. I say to the crossbenchers who are in the chamber: it is unusual in parliamentary practice that an opposition has to move so many suspensions of standing orders to try to get a debate, to try to get a discussion, on so many pieces of legislation. What we've seen with the new standing orders, what we've seen with the Leader of the House, on so many occasions—usually with the most serious and significant legislation that we're talking about, including these IR laws—is that you get gagged. The debate gets guillotined, and the process gets gagged. When this legislation went through the House the first time—Deputy Speaker, you may remember—the same process happened. There was a gag and a guillotine of it. When the legislation first went through the House, the debate on every amendment was limited to 20 minutes. That is almost unseen and unheard of in this chamber.

To go back to where we are now: this legislation, after being guillotined and gagged, went to the Senate. We saw the same process in the Senate. The legislation in the Senate was guillotined and gagged—and in fact there was a mistake made because of that process. Now the legislation's come back to the House, and we have had almost no opportunity to look at this amended legislation. Some of these things we hadn't seen when it went through the first time. The problem with this, and it's a problem with any piece of legislation, but this is significant legislation for every business, for every employer, in this country, is that—we know, because we get told this—neither big business nor small business are clear on the significance of some of this legislation. When you read media reports from the ministers on some of these issues, it's confusing as to what some of this legislation means.

I don't believe, with all due respect to the Leader of the House and the minister, that he necessarily understands all the ramifications of this legislation. You would normally have a great opportunity in this chamber to flesh that out. There'd be lots of views. You could even have a parliamentary committee look into it and have real stakeholder engagement. The minister said he had stakeholder engagement. Believe you me, Deputy Speaker, the most stakeholder engagement the minister would have done would have been with the union movement. We could've had parliamentary committees look into this and really flesh some of these questions out. We didn't do that. That's one thing, but the fact that we can't now even have a proper debate and questions in this chamber, and move amendments on the legislation because of some of the things we're worried about, again shows the hypocrisy of this new government, given that they spoke about integrity and transparency before the election. They've shown that that was a furphy.

I welcome the member for Wentworth's contribution to this. Again, I say to the crossbenchers: it is almost unheard of, how many bills of significance are being gagged and guillotined in this chamber. There's no surprise in it, especially with this IR legislation, because we know who preselects and pays for the members opposite. This is paying the puppetmaster. It's still a great shame—

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