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

I only wish to indicate our support for these amendments. It does still concern me that the government could have spent a little more time examining the bill prior to bringing it before parliament. Ultimately, the committee is not supposed to be the catch-all if the government fails, as we tried to explain once before. It is probably worth reminding the minister, now that he has moved on to being a minister rather than a committee member: the role of the committee is not a catch-all, as a final check to ensure that the government has dotted its i’s and crossed its t’s; it should have done that before bringing the bill to the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee. The committee’s role is much broader than that. One part of its role is to be a check on the executive—to examine bills and to be a house of review. That is the real role, and the committee process gives an opportunity to participants to make submissions and raise substantive policy issues about the bill, rather than to try to improve it in a technical sense. However, the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee finds itself in that role too often, and I would like to encourage the minister, in bringing forward new bills that he has control over, to look more closely at dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.

Question agreed to.