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

It did that in the past sitting fortnight, and the government has not been able to say that it is business as usual. We now have a case where the government has a significant number of bills that it is requesting be put through, presumably by Thursday night, the early hours of Friday morning or later on Friday, and the government does need to make a case as to whether those bills are in fact urgent for this week and whether they have a start-up date that requires them to be addressed. There is one, the Australian Crime Commission Amendment Bill 2007, which we have received a briefing on, and it could be said that the Quarantine Amendment (Commission of Inquiry) Bill 2007 is one such bill; but, in respect of the remainder of the bills, the government does need to make a case. When you look at the legislative package, you see that even a conservative estimate would put the hours of government business time required to deal with that legislation at somewhere between 21 and 30-odd hours, providing that there are no hiccups. In a less than ordinary week of the Senate, government business takes up about 51 per cent of the time, which means that you are looking at 15-odd hours of government time to be able to deal with legislation. This suggests that there is a huge gap between what the government expects and wants in the legislative program and the hours that are available to do it.

The Senate should not be treated as a rubber stamp. Each bill needs to be considered carefully, debated and put, and amendments need to be argued for and either carried or lost, as the case may be. If the government is going to maintain its position that it requires all of these bills to be passed by Friday without providing a justification as to their urgency and without a full explanation then the government has, whether or not it wants to admit it, treated the Senate as a rubber stamp and it has not ensured that proper debate has been undertaken.

To look at the particular issues, the government has indicated—if not in actual words then in substance—that it has a program that would otherwise be an end of session program. Therefore, the government needs to make clear whether it is in fact saying that this is the end of the session and that it does not expect that the sittings will resume in October. The government should also undertake to prioritise the legislation, because the other question that arises is: if, through the ordinary course of work on Friday, the passage of the bills has not been completed, does the government intend to continue to sit through Friday night or to abandon the remaining bills, and, if so, which ones? In other words, is it going to prioritise the legislation or simply work through the list ad seriatim?

The opposition has always taken the view, and continues to take the view, that we will work diligently with those pieces of legislation to ensure that they are properly scrutinised and dealt with. We will not, as others might argue we will do, filibuster the legislative program. But, when I look at the bills that need to be dealt with, it does seem to me that the government in this instance has bitten off more than it can chew—and, may I say, without a clear justification for every one of those bills. The government does seem to be in a less than desirable position. Either it is not managing the program very well or it is treating it like an end of session. That is the position the government needs to explain to the Senate today.