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

The minister still has not answered the question about the Scrutiny of Bills Committee report. He once again referred to the Legal and Constitutional Affairs Committee report. Maybe we have a new task for our new President; he can abolish the Scrutiny of Bills Committees because they are seen by the government as completely irrelevant. The committee tables this thing called an Alert Digest. That means be alert, look at it, read it. The committee report was unanimous across the parties with a record number of concerns touching on its terms of reference. They are not policy based but are based on fundamental principles that should be applied to every piece of legislation that is considered and passed by this chamber. Is there any recognition from the government that this even exists? We are talking about fundamental breaches of civil rights and freedoms. You can put forward a rationale and justifications for it, but do not just ignore the whole thing as if it did not exist, and do not just give us a bunch of assertions and a few travel stories.

Is there any intent or desire to engage genuinely on this issue or are we just going to get dismissal after dismissal? It is incomprehensible that there is no recognition of the role of this committee, which has been in existence for decades, and the importance of the issues that it looks at day after day. You are a minister now, Senator Scullion; you are supposed to look at this stuff. I know you are not the primary minister, but you should know that that is what it is there for. I am sure you have not been a minister long enough to forget what it is like not to be a minister and to forget about the role that committees play. These are fundamental, non-partisan, basic issues before we get into some of the policy detail. Is there going to be any response to that? Can the Senate expect that response whilst we are still considering the legislation or will we get some perfunctory piece of rubbish some time down the track when you can be bothered?

I am still very perplexed about the status of the Little children are sacred report. Even in some of the previous responses to the issues raised by others—and certainly in responses to the very short Senate committee process that we had—the government kept going back and saying, ‘Well, the Little children are sacred report raised this,’ or ‘as the Little children are sacred report said’, but now we are told it is all behind us. The Northern Territory government got slagged from one end of the country to the other—probably quite justifiably—for not responding to it quickly enough, and the next thing we knew, it was behind us.