Alan Ferguson (SA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Webber, I am stating the facts, because I was on the committees that finished early. If you cannot use all the time that is currently available, I cannot see how you can say that the committees are being shortened and that spillover days have been knocked off. There was not enough questioning to make the committees last four days. I was even more surprised when one of the opposition senators said to me, ‘The shadow minister hasn’t sent us enough questions.’ I thought that was a rather poor way of putting it, because I remember our time in opposition when we had to supply our own questions; they did not come from the shadow ministers.

I am very pleased to quote Michelle Grattan’s article this morning, where she said:

Despite its reduced clout, the Senate has certain natural stabilisers. When the minority parties lose power, the task of scrutiny falls more heavily to the government’s own.

I think that that is a very fair comment from Michelle Grattan. You only have to take the reports that have been tabled in the last couple of weeks by the Joint Standing Committee on Migration and one other committee to show that the government’s own people are carefully scrutinising some of these things that are taking place.