Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to move a motion in relation to the Hansard record of proceedings.

Leave granted.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the Hansard record of proceedings.

I had expected Senator Ronaldson to be here and I would have given him the opportunity to speak. But he will get the opportunity to respond at some other time. I want to raise a point about this before the substantive matter is dealt with by Senator Stephens, who will go to the report proper. I will only take a short time; I know there is a limited amount of time to deal with these matters. The matter I want to raise is this, and the opposition is not going to let it go by: this matter was referred on 8 February 2007, the close of submissions was on 16 February 2007 and, by all accounts, the first opportunity to have a hearing was on Monday, 26 February. The report was tabled on Tuesday, which is yesterday, not even with the Hansard. What we are now seeing is the Hansard follow the tabled report.

It is more than unacceptable because there is no rush in respect of this bill. An easier course, and a course often followed here, is to provide an interim report, which could have been tabled tomorrow if need be. It certainly is not going to be dealt with this week; it has not been on the red to be dealt with this week. The next opportunity for it to be debated is likely to be not until late March. We have an arrogant government that seeks to table a report prior to the availability of the Hansard. You then get this ridiculous situation where you download the report to have a look at it and instead of Hansard page numbers for witnesses and submitters you get the committee secretariat’s notes. It seems to me that that is not only unacceptable but also beyond the pale. It is a shabby way of dealing with it. That is no reflection on the committee secretariat; I am absolutely sure they are doing the best they can under the circumstances. It is the chair’s responsibility and the government’s responsibility to ensure that they do not treat the submitters and the Senate in that shabby way.

As I said, it is not listed for debate so what is the rush? I would certainly like to hear the government’s perspective as to why they want to use the Senate in this way, or are they just simply doing it because they can, because they have the numbers to be able to push these reports through? Hold on a minute and do it properly, at least. The proper way to deal with these things is to ensure that at least you have the Hansard, and that the committee report is written in such a way that everyone has their Hansard record acknowledged, rather than dropping it in a printed form yesterday when it was not even until today that we could gain a copy from the tables office. The only opportunity people had to see the report was to download it. And, as I said, if you tried to download it you got the silly circumstance of committee notes. It simply should not have happened.

There are two explanations. Either the chair is new, and that is true, or the government is being arrogant and forcing these reports through unnecessarily. It is not necessary to do it in this way. I am not going to let it go without commenting on the version we now have of the way the government treats the Senate. Once upon a time, the chair, in his committee role, acted as a gatekeeper to this place. What you have now is the government acting arrogantly and pushing through reports for no other reason than it can, since it has control of the Senate.