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

The position now, of course, is that Senator Cormann has to stretch to say, ‘Look, I don’t have a particular bill before me to deal with to try to support the insane position I am now trying to adopt,’ so he introduces a private senator’s bill to give himself cover for the pantomime that is being played out here. He intended to wait for a bill to come across from the House to the Senate and amend that, but it is an unrelated bill. It is not dealing with the substance of the matter; it is an unrelated bill, and he was seeking to tack. So not only do we have an unprecedented position now emerging here, where Senator Cormann is using the Senate in this peculiar and unprecedented way, but this is a second way of providing himself a cover for the pantomime that he is trying to act out. That is, quite frankly, unprecedented in that it is normal practice in this place not to tack other amendments onto bills, and usually both the opposition and the government take the principled position and reject tacking bills. Why? Because the amendments are not about the substance. They have not been through a Senate committee. They have not been dealt with in an appropriate way. They have not been looked at, scrutinised—and, of course, that is the usual position we adopt this place.

Instead, the opposition have now breached two significant principles. One is—in the first instance, to provide Senator Cormann cover for his pantomime—to say that it is okay to tack bills. That is a significant breach of what I would call the usual procedures in this place and the policies that oppositions for a long time have adopted. Why? Because it is a sensible, principled position to adopt. Why? Because all governments can suffer from tacking bills, which are then used as stunts in the Senate and which eat up time. Why? Because we have a bicameral system, so it has to also pass to the House to be considered, and the reality of that should be driven home to the opposition.

The opposition have to understand—and maybe they have been in opposition for too short a time to follow this—that, first of all, the principles in this place are that the government determines the legislative program and the government determines the order of bills to be dealt with, and the principle usually adopted in this place is that you do not tack bills, especially when you do not even have them in the Senate to begin with and you try to second-guess when a bill is going to be introduced into the Senate. If it is not introduced, you then second-guess again—so it is an assumption based upon an assumption—and say, ‘Seeing that it’s not here, I’m going to introduce a private senator’s bill to hijack the legislative program.’ That is the third breach by the opposition in a program, because if you agree to all of these—there are three so far, and I am counting—what is to prevent Senator Xenophon, Senator Fielding or the Greens, although I suspect they are more reasonable than this position, from adopting mad tactics in this place to turn it upside down so we do not deal with our legislative program? We are then in a position where we are always at risk of having this place turned upside down at any time. They are the principles that have long been established in this place to allow proper scrutiny of the legislation, to allow the Senate to do its work. The opposition are now saying that they will throw all that in the bin and deal with whatever mad stunt a particular senator might come up with to give himself notoriety—