Chris Ellison (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Justice and Customs) Share this | Hansard source

In the short time available I want to canvass a number of issues. Firstly, there is the ludicrous proposition of the opposition that this government has restricted time for scrutiny of bills. When the opposition was in government we used to have a Friday committee. A bill would be introduced one week, you would have the Friday to sit to consider that bill and then you would report the following week. I remember that as a matter of practice when I sat on the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee. That was what we experienced as an opposition when this opposition was in government—a Friday committee system applied.

I want to foreshadow an amendment to the motion which has been moved by Senator Ferris, and that is:

At the end of the motion, add “and, in respect of the Human Services (Enhanced Service Delivery) Bill 2007, the Finance and Public Administration Committee report by 15 March 2007.”.

That will allow a five-week period of consideration for the bills that are considered in the Senate. That is not an unreasonable time. The government has previously released this bill in the form of an exposure draft for public comment—four weeks of exposure in December. When you add that to the five-week period which we are seeking, that is nine weeks of public scrutiny. Of course, the early passage of this bill is required to ensure that a legal framework is available to support the implementation of the proposed smartcard system, to enable registration for the card to commence in early 2008 and to provide sufficient time to provide meaningful information to the public about the proposed changes. Of course, the June date which has been suggested by the opposition is farcical. It would totally dismantle the time frame regime I have mentioned that is so essential. This legislation will provide certainty to achieve cost-effective procurement of technological services which will be required to support the smartcard. If any amendments are proposed to the bill by the committee, the 15 March reporting date will allow time for them to be considered by the government. That relates to the Human Services (Enhanced Service Delivery) Bill 2007.

The opposition is also seeking the referral of a number of tax bills and superannuation bills to a committee for reporting during the week of 1 March. These bills are technical; they relate to matters which have previously been scrutinised in detail. They have been examined by the Senate Standing Committee on Economics and there would be little benefit referring these bills to a Senate committee. That would simply delay matters. We know that we have a heavy legislation schedule for this sitting period and referring the bills to a committee will delay them. The amendments in these bills are minor and technical in nature; they raise no significant policy issues. All the policy issues have been dealt with previously and have been scrutinised by the Senate Economics Committee, as I said earlier. It is essential that we get these bills passed as soon as possible so that these changes can be put in place for the benefit of the Australian public.

When you get these comments about how little scrutiny of legislation we have had, it is interesting to take a look. Just last year we had a record number of bills referred to committees—100 bills were referred to committees last year. That is hardly an indication of a lack of scrutiny. In this case, we are saying that there are a number of bills which should be referred to committees, with realistic time limits. We have to get these bills in place so that these policy initiatives can be implemented.

The issue of the Scrutiny of Bills Committee is one which we have to address because the committee is not sitting regularly enough to consider bills which are introduced. As soon as a bill is introduced we want to consider whether it needs to go to a committee so that we can give it as much time as possible. What we have been experiencing is that we have to wait for the committee to sit. This is not a criticism of that committee; it is just that it meets at a certain time and we have to wait until that committee sits so that we can refer a bill and consider its reference. (Time expired)