Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) 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, 30 March, 2017.

Question agreed to.

On indulgence, I will just update the House on the sitting hours situation. Unfortunately, I do not have good news for colleagues in the House of Representatives. The Senate will not return any of the bills that the government is intending to pass in the session this evening or in the early hours of the morning. For those people who have been through this many times before, it takes about an hour to three hours to turn around bills from the Senate into the House of Representatives. We could sit here all night until the early hours of the morning and have nothing to actually deal with from the Senate. Even if they finish at 3 am or 4 am, which is very unlikely, as they have scheduled a shower break for 4 am, it will be 7 am or 8 am when they turn around those bills. The government's view is that we will suspend the House late this afternoon in the normal course of events. Then we will have the House suspended until the ringing of the bells, and the ringing of the bells will not be before 9 am on Friday. That will give the Senate, and the people who do all this good work in the House on our behalf, time to get those bills back to us in the format that we can then deal with them.

I do not apologise; it is not the fault of me or the government. I do express some regret to the rest of the House that the Senate has put us in that position. But they are also a democratically house and that is the choice that they have made. So we are sitting on Friday. We will, obviously, try tomorrow morning to expedite the business as quickly and efficiently as possible. That will mean that people will get home on Friday, but, unfortunately, we cannot get home first thing in the morning as I had originally hoped.