Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

Thankfully I have now been freed of that onerous responsibility, Senator Marshall. It was very kind of the government to take that away from me. Perhaps I will have more opportunity in future. Report No. 78 is definitely worth reading for people who want a good overview of the history of this matter, of the work of the committee and various opinions on it over a 10-year period. I certainly do not dissent from it at all. I signed off on it as a member of the committee. I want to take the opportunity to make some comments of my own about the history of the committee’s role in reviewing treaties, the lead-up to its implementation and where it should go from here. I am currently a member of the committee; I have been on and off a few times over the period I have been in the Senate. Back through the early 1990s, the Democrats agitated quite regularly for a much stronger role for the parliament in reviewing the very large number of treaties that the Australian government enters into. There has often been a lot of fairly exaggerated talk about the Australian government handing away our sovereignty to international bodies when we enter into these treaties. The fact that this committee was established has been a mechanism to show that a lot of that rhetoric is completely unfounded. That is not to say that—