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, 22 June 2017.

In so doing I might read the statement, because it is quite a complicated process!

The position of both the government and the ALP on the school bill is well-known. Negotiations on the substance of the bill have concluded. What have not concluded are negotiations about when the bill will be returned to the House with a request for the House to make amendments. The timing of that request for amendments is dependent on our Senate colleagues, and I will endeavour to advise the House at 5 o'clock when we will receive that request. Hopefully, it will be tonight.

We will return the request to the Senate and then deal with the bill, finally, tomorrow. In effect, we are waiting for the Senate tonight and we will wait for the Senate tomorrow. I will update the House again at 5 o'clock. To explain that to members: the Senate is dealing with the school funding bill, and because the Senate—

Opposition Members:

Opposition members interjecting—

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

Order on my left! The member for Lindsay! Seriously, members want to be updated on what is occurring.

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

I thought you would want to know—obviously not! The member for Lindsay does not want to know.

The Senate are dealing with the school funding bill but they intend to make an appropriation. That requires them to make a request of the House of Representatives, which means there is an extra step in the process of dealing with their types of amendments. One is a request for an appropriation. Obviously, the Senate are not allowed to make appropriations unless we give them the permission to do so. That means that the request for the appropriation needs to come back to the House of Representatives, be passed—hopefully, passed—and then transmitted back to the Senate, where they will then deal with the final bill.

Practice in the past has been that the Senate deal with their request and with any other amendments in their entirety and then send the bill back to us before we then send it back to them. What I have asked the Senate to do is to deal with that appropriation first, if they would, then send it to us so that we can deal with it. Then we will send it back to them and they will finally deal with the third reading of the bill when they receive that request back.

They have not agreed to do that yet. I am hopeful that they might, but they do not have to. So the bottom line, colleagues, is that we cannot leave here tonight until that request has been dealt with. Then we have to deal with the final amendments to the bill as a separate process, which will have to come back from the Senate. So, basically, there are two processes—two bounces between the houses.

What I have discussed with the Manager of Opposition Business, and I think this is a sensible process, is that we will suspend the House until the ringing of the bells, which we have done before. In fact, we often do that at the end of session. We will pick a particular time when those bills will be rung again—say, about 9 pm, for example, so that colleagues can have dinner and do whatever they have to do without sitting and waiting for the House to discuss things while we wait for the Senate. And then we will ring the bells when we need you to come back to the chamber.

We cannot all go home to Kingston or Deakin or wherever we are and stay there; we will need to come back tonight at some point. But I will update the House throughout the evening if the Senate is more cooperative than that—obviously, we would all like that to be the case. So you cannot go home tonight and not come back but we will not just keep people here, probably between five and nine. And we will sit tomorrow morning, probably at nine, in order to deal, finally, with the Senate bill.

Question agreed to.