Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Humphries is right on the mark and I agree with him totally. The questioning of the constitutionality of the passage of the pensions bill from the coalition, supported by the crossbench, through this chamber last night is a political diversion away from the need for the government to take action to increase pensions and to ameliorate the very hard times that pensioners—not least single pensioners—are having to make ends meet as costs rise right across the board.

The prospect of a constitutional showdown over this bill is neither edifying nor a good way for the government to be treating this parliament. The government should, if it wishes to block the Senate’s legislation for an increase in pensions, simply use its numbers to prevent that debate taking place on the floor of the House of Representatives and then accept responsibility for that action. Its effort to simply say, ‘We cannot take this debate on because there is a constitutional flaw,’ is in my books a red herring. It is entirely unnecessary. We have the advice of the Clerk of the Senate in the letter he wrote to Senator Minchin. And it is compelling evidence that since the 1920s, if not earlier, serial Presidents have ruled on the validity of bills such as the bill passed by the Senate last night because provision is made for appropriation for matters like pensions—and there are the other examples cited of payments through the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme and legislation from time to time to alter pensions or the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme—to originate in the Senate because the appropriation is available under the original enacting legislation.

I notice that the Clerk of the House of Representatives, Mr Harris, had this to say on The World Today on ABC Radio today:

There are very severe doubts as to the constitutionality of this bill. My belief is that a bill of this kind should not have originated in the Senate.

On the legal component of that statement, it is not good enough for the Clerk to have a belief. The Clerk should produce the argument and the rationale behind that belief, as the Clerk of the Senate, Mr Harry Evans, has done for the members of this place and indeed the wider public, who are no doubt taking an increasing interest in this matter.

When the Clerk of the House of Representatives, Mr Harris, says that his belief is that a bill of this kind should not have originated in the Senate, I do not think there is a senator who would disagree. It should have originated in the House of Representatives and it should have come from the government. But the fact is it did not. It did not because this government has failed to take up the public feeling of the moment, not least, according to Senator Evans’s figures, from some 3.7 million pensioners who want an increase in their pensions.

The reality is, as I have said a number times in debate, that the government had no trouble in its budget in May, with no reference to committees, no inquiries—nothing at all—passing legislation for $31 billion in tax cuts over four years. If it can do that, it can raise pensions for a couple of billion dollars to have the neediest people in our community a little bit better off.

Question agreed to.