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

This is a very important issue and the Senate needs to recognise that this is not just some minor spat to start the day. I have been involved with, or one step removed from, the Selection of Bills Committee process for a long time now. It worked perfectly well throughout all the period of this government—very cooperatively, very smoothly. There were occasional disagreements which were sorted out here in the chamber, but basically it worked quite well until this government got control of the Senate. It took them about six months after that before they started really mucking around with this process. The simple fact is that now we have the absurd situation where the government is referring its own bills, sight unseen, en masse and with the shortest possible time frames, to committees without any reason for their referral, without adequate time for the community to have input or for the committee to consider bills, and then railroading them back through here.

We had the ridiculous circumstance in the final sitting week in December last year where we had, through two reports of the Selection of Bills Committee, a total of 25 bills referred through 13 different packages to a whole range of different committees, almost all of them to report back either this week or the next sitting week in February, with all of that Christmas period in between. If people think it is possible for the community and different interest groups to keep track over the Christmas period of 25 different bills in a whole range of different areas and for the committees to do that work during that break, then they are kidding themselves. That is the sort of ridiculous circumstance we are in. The way it always used to work and the way it has to work is for there to be enough time after the bills are introduced to at least see what is in them before we can figure out what issues are being raised and whether or not they merit an inquiry and what sort of inquiry they merit.

This myth that is now being regularly put about that somehow or other, once upon a time, bills used to be introduced one week, we would have a Friday hearing, and then they would be debated the next week is just not true. I do not know why it continues to be said, but it is simply not true. I would like to get Senator Robert Ray in here; he has an elephantine memory and could detail in fine points the reality of what happens—I have heard him do it once or twice. He has probably given up bothering to come in and actually talk about the reality of what happens. But it just did not happen that way.

It does not matter how often you keep repeating it, it is not true. I have been around in various guises before I came into this chamber back to 1990 and I saw the changes that were made to the committee system in 1994—a number of which have now been reversed with the government taking all of them over again—and this notion that there was a one-week turnaround with a Friday hearing is not the way it worked. The simple fact is that for significant pieces of legislation that do require proper examination and do require community input, we are doing our job. It is not politics; it is not looking for advantage—it is doing our job. We are not looking for where the votes are; we are passing laws that are in place for decades that affect the entire Australian community and the government do not think we should take the time to look at them.

We have this proposal from the ALP that a raft of tax bills be examined for quite a brief inquiry and the government’s response is just: ‘No, not negotiable. We’re not even going to think about it, you just can’t do it.’ Who is the Treasurer to dictate to the Senate and say, ‘You can’t look at these tax bills’? What a disgrace that those are the depths to which we have sunk. The Treasurer can sit in his office over there, dictate to the Senate and say, ‘You’re not allowed to look at these tax bills.’

There are a bunch of five tax bills, and the people who have looked at them say, ‘These need some further examination only for a month or six weeks.’ What is the problem? I bet you anything you like those bills will not be debated here by the time that they would have been reported back on, as is being proposed in this amendment. It is complete contempt and complete arrogance and that is what we have sunk to. Do not let anybody kid you that this is business as usual. This is a serious undermining of the core business of the Senate. It is an absolute travesty and it is the key reason that the role of the Senate and the composition of the Senate after the next election has to be of major focus and major interest to the people of Australia because, if the coalition gets away with this this time around, you ain’t seen nothing yet. (Time expired)