Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Minister for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That standing order 31 (automatic adjournment of the House) and standing order 33 (limit on business) be suspended for the sitting on Thursday, 26 June 2014.

This is the usual motion that is moved on the last day of a session when we are abandoning the adjournment at 4:30 in order to be able to conduct government business for as long as it takes so that we can get out at a reasonable hour tonight. My anticipation, for the members of the House who are interested in their travel arrangements et cetera, is that we will have a debate on the carbon tax repeal bill today and the MRRT repeal bill today. We have allowed most of the day for that debate. If the opposition abandon their MPI, which I doubt that they will want to do, that would give this extra time. But we do not intend at this stage to abandon the MPI. We will then start going through the final stages of both the MRRT bill and the carbon tax bill.

I anticipate that we will not rise of the normal are five o'clock but I think we will rise reasonably shortly after that, depending on whether opposition is of a mind to be a reasonable or unreasonable—that would depend on them. I anticipate that, even if the opposition is unreasonable, we will still rise a couple of hours after five o'clock. So most people will be able to get out tonight. We certainly will not be sitting tomorrow. My anticipation is that most people will be able to get out on planes after about seven o'clock tonight at the latest.

Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Quite pertinent to this resolution are arguments that have been happening for some months when this parliament was regularly sitting and had run out of legislation. At the time, the opposition was making the point that the government was not properly managing its legislative program. We predicted that we would end up in these circumstances having had weeks where, regularly, there were was no business before the House at all and we actually spent some months debating the speech from the Governor-General here in the chamber because there was no legislation left. We predicted that poor management of the government program would lead to this.

We now have a circumstance where I cannot remember a week where we have had so many gag motions and there have been so many occasions where the government has shut down debate. Having done all of that, they still cannot manage the program within the ordinary hours that are available for this parliament. This is not something that is in the ordinary course of events. It is not normal for us have a circumstance where for many weeks there was basically no business before the House. Then we get to the final two weeks of these sittings and the government have consistently shut down debate. Yesterday only one backbencher from the government wanted to speak on the direct action policy that they claimed they were so proud of before they shut that one down. And now we have a circumstance where we are told within the ordinary hours of parliament they cannot fit the legislation in. The opposition does not support this resolution. The government have brought this on themselves through poor management of the parliament.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion be agreed to.