Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank the House for passing that resolution. I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent the following occurring:

(1) the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment Bill 2014 [No. 3] being presented without notice, read a first time, second reading moved and the debate on the motion for the second reading being adjourned to a later hour;

(2) immediately thereafter the Road Safety Remuneration Repeal Bill 2016 being presented without notice, read a first time, second reading moved and the debate on the motion for the second reading being adjourned to a later hour;

(3) immediately thereafter the Road Safety Remuneration Amendment (Protecting Owner Drivers) Bill 2016 being presented without notice, read a first time, second reading moved and the debate on the motion for the second reading being adjourned to a later hour;

(4) when the order of the day for the resumption of debate on the second reading of the Road Safety Remuneration Repeal Bill 2016 is called on, a cognate debate taking place with the Road Safety Remuneration Amendment (Protecting Owner Drivers) Bill 2016; and

(5) any variation to this arrangement being made only by a motion moved by a Minister.

The purpose of this motion and subsequent motions is to allow the House to debate the matters for which it has been recalled. We have just dealt with the Australian Building and Construction Commission legislation message to be sent back to the Senate, and this House has passed that bill twice. We will now give the Senate an opportunity to bring productivity back to the building and construction industry and to bring the rule of law back to the building and construction industry, but there are other bills that the government wishes to deal with. One of those is the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment Bill 2014, a bill that this House has passed three times, and a bill that is designed to support honest workers, honest union leaders and the people that they represent, and to root out dishonest union leaders in unions. It is a bill which we have passed three times and which we will pass again in the next 24 hours.

There are two other bills that, it has become absolutely apparent since the House last sat, need to be passed: the Road Safety Remuneration Repeal Bill 2016 and the Road Safety Remuneration Amendment (Protecting Owner Drivers) Bill 2016, in the event that the abolition bill is not passed. I do not wish to delay the House in the substance of the debate around the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal bill, because members want to get on with debating it, and there is a long list of members on both sides of the House who wish to speak on the disastrous, catastrophic events surrounding owner drivers of trucks, introduced by the Labor Party when they decided to put small business out of business, look after big unions, big government and big business. That is why we are moving the suspension in the terms that have been described—in order to allow the House to deal with those bills according to the standing orders.

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

Let us make no mistake: the reason we have this debate management motion being put forward is that those opposite are not willing to sit for more than two days. The reason they have to have a motion to do this is that those opposite are not willing to face question time for the remainder of the week. They expect taxpayers to pay for us to come down here, but they are not willing to turn up to be accountable. I am not surprised that the Prime Minister does not want to be in the same room as his colleagues for the whole of the week. It is not the first time a government has replaced a Prime Minister. It is the first time the one who was replaced has continued to govern!

It is the first time that the one who was deposed has remained in charge of the legislative agenda! What we just heard across in the other place from the government—

Opposition members: Bye! Bye!

That is right: the Prime Minister is off to a room with all his supporters, but the Liberal Party remain here! That is what is going on over there. We have a situation in this House where we just walked across to the Senate to hear the Governor-General quote from the same speech that had been provided to the previous Governor-General by the previous Prime Minister! The reason we are here is to debate an Abbott government bill to defend Abbott government reasons, as those opposite prepare a photocopy of the Abbott government budget!

The member for Warringah is dead right when he says the next election is going to be about the legacy of his government. That is exactly the reason we have been called here. Didn't the Prime Minister think he was oh so clever the day he called us all back here? Didn't he think it was a stroke of Constitutional brilliance? Now he discovers what it means is that the die is cast and that everybody knows that they are pursuing at every level—from budgetary angles through to their approach to industrial relations—the same agenda that was there from the previous government. The rhetoric of fear is back and the outcomes that they seek are exactly the same.

In the comments that were just made by the Leader of the House we had a claim that we were brought back here to deal with the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal. No we were not. There was no mention of that when we were brought back. What the Leader of the House has just said is completely misleading. We were not brought back here for that reason at all. When the tribunal was making this decision the government declined to even make a submission! The government had no interest back then in having anything to say about road safety. And don't you notice now, every time those opposite stand up to talk about the Road Safety Remuneration Tribunal in media conferences they will only call the tribunal by its acronym. They will only use the acronym to describe it because they will not dare acknowledge that they are abolishing something established in the name of road safety. That is what they do not want known. That is what they will have nothing to do with.

To hear from the Leader of the House—the person who had praised Kathy Jackson, the person who had been in here claiming that Kathy Jackson was the symbol of a freedom fighter and a person for us all to look up to—and to think that he has any credibility at all in coming into this place to say that he can have an opinion on trade union officials and who to trust and who not to! The Leader of the House has been completely deceptive in the reasons he has given and in the motion that is in front of us now.

The motion that is in front of us is simply an excuse to make sure that they can get out of this place as quickly as possible. I am not surprised they want to get out of this place as quickly as possible, because we know that every time they are all here together the plotting continues. The plotting continues on their backbench and the plotting continues among their previous ministers. Where does it all lead? Every time there is a policy advance that this Prime Minister might think he might make he always ends up caving in to the member for Menzies and the member for Warringah. Every single policy debate ends up where they want it to be, every time.

They want to have a process whereby, in avoiding question time, they only have to have two days dealing with the fact that the Prime Minister has proposed double taxation from the states and the Commonwealth on income tax! They only have to have two days defending the fact that the Prime Minister suggested that the Commonwealth should only fund private schools. They only have two days where they have to defend the fact that what they are going to do about the banks is say really mean words but do absolutely nothing. They only have to have two days where they have to answer questions about the absolute rorts and corruption by the New South Wales branch of the Liberal Party, which they do not want to have to defend and which they do not want a public spotlight on. Most importantly, they only have to have two days where they are all in the same place!

There will be a book released later today, and I will tell you what: that book was meant to be a piece of history, not a how-to guide!

We might have learnt lessons from it but those opposite have decided that it is a 'how-to' guide, and they are following every stage of it to the letter!

We know, when the member for Warringah and the member for Menzies were proposed to be part of the committee, what was going through the Prime Minister's mind; we know that those opposite are absolutely aware of the problems within their own ranks and problems that, at their heart, come from having a Prime Minister and a Treasurer without an agenda—a Prime Minister and a Treasurer without an agenda at all!

The problem is that when this Prime Minister stands for nothing and changes nothing it means that the policies of the Abbott government remain in place. We are heading for a photocopy of the 2014 budget. We would like to be here all week to debate those issues. We would like to have a situation where members of parliament who want to have a say on legislation have the opportunity to be able to have that say on legislation—and those opposite want to get out of here as quickly as they can.

The Prime Minister stood up and announced the proroguing of the parliament in a completely unprecedented way. This has only happened four times before in the nation's history: it has happened twice for visits by the Queen; once when an election was running, technically, late; and once following the death of Harold Holt. No-one before has ever thought they needed to use the Governor-General to run their political arguments for them in the lead-up to an election. What those opposite have done this time is completely unprecedented. That is the reason for this motion.

This motion has nothing to do with the ordinary management of parliamentary debate, because this is no ordinary week of parliament. This is a week of parliament that only runs for two days. This is a week of parliament that is unprecedented—a week where those opposite are running scared, not only of questions from this side of the House but they have no idea what their own backbench are going to do. They have no idea what their own backbench will say about the royal commission into the banks. They have no idea what their own backbench will say on whatever crazy-brave idea the Prime Minister might think of tomorrow and get knocked down by his party room a couple of days later. They have no idea, and when you have a government with no idea it means that everything that was there previously remains in place.

I never thought there would be this moment: when the Deputy Prime Minister was Acting Prime Minister for a moment I thought, 'It could even be better! It could even be better than his predecessor!' I have to say, for those two days it was actually calmer than when the Prime Minister is in charge! That was achieved by the Deputy Prime Minister.

But we are here now in a parliament that was called for chaotic reasons—in a parliament that was called through a crazy-brave idea by the Prime Minister. And when he called it, everybody presumed it meant we were all here for three weeks. When he called it, everybody presumed that the parliament was here for three weeks—not that we would be here as little lemmings to perform a stunt for the Prime Minister and then people would be sent away to hide the fact that this is a government that does not want to answer questions because they do not know what they stand for.

Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That the motion be put.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question is that the motion be put.

Tony Smith (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The question now is that the motion moved by the Leader of the House be agreed to.