Amanda Vanstone (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

The reason we cannot ‘just’ fix it now is that it is apparently an amendment that requires policy approval. From what I have been told, I infer that that means probably either prime ministerial tick-off or cabinet approval—probably the latter. The other point I make is about a remark made to me once by Dame Margaret Guilfoyle, who used to hold the portfolio that this legislation comes out of. She described it as ‘pick-up sticks’ in that every time you touched one bit, all the other sticks in the pile moved. From my own experience in this portfolio, while we can look at individual things and say, ‘I think we ought to do this,’ the process of deciding that is perhaps not difficult. The work involved in ensuring what other flow-on effects there might be—and I do not mean just consequential amendments—as a consequence of what you do, needs to be considered.

As you know, this is not my portfolio, so the best I can do is to give you the advice I have been given by the minister: that the government is looking at it and you will be kept informed. I can and will ask the minister to give you in the next couple of weeks an indication of the timetable for consideration of this. I cannot give you that because I am not the minister, but I can ask the minister for it.