Michael Ronaldson (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Special Minister of State) Share this | Hansard source

The comments from Senator Heffernan were in relation to, I think, some matters that the Greens have some amendments on later on. I want to address this first amendment. We will of course, as I said before, be opposing this at the third reading. There may be a question about why we would let the second reading proceed to this stage. We need to do that to make sure that schedules 2 to 6 are removed from this bill because, if we were not to do so, clearly there would be two competing pieces of legislation. I am no constitutional lawyer. I am sure the clerks, as always, have a far better idea of these things than I do, but we would have had two bits of conflicting pieces of legislation on the books. That is why we are enabling this matter to go into committee—to address these issues.

The interesting part is that we had the amendment yesterday because the government had not even realised what was being done. So we had an amendment prepared yesterday and, about half an hour before this bill was due to be debated, the government realised what had happened and tried to move the amendments which we support.

As I said earlier, this has been quite extraordinary. This bill has been around for a long, long time now and, at the eleventh hour, this government is showing its inexperience and its incompetence by not having been able to address these matters earlier. They are quite substantial issues. While we do not agree with this bill, it would be churlish for us not to support amendments (2) and (3). In relation to amendment (1), clearly the opposition supports the removal of schedules 2 to 6 because there is already now legislation on the books which supports that, in the Tax Laws Amendment (2008 Measures No. 2) Bill 2008.

Why the government, when we had flagged it very early on, waited until the eleventh hour to address this is quite frankly beyond us. They actually, quite rightly, got squeezed by people who were going to suffer if schedules 2 to 6 were not implemented before 1 July. So, at the eleventh hour, these changes were made. A lot of people went through a lot of pain for a long period of time before this decision was made. Why did it take until last week for this measures No. 2 bill to come in to address a situation that the government was acutely aware of? It has been shambolic. This week has been shambolic. The left hand and the right hand, quite frankly, have not even been introduced—let alone forgotten what each other looks like. This government have got a lot to learn and they need to learn it very quickly because this place will become shambolic if they do not so.