Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have some matters of rebuttal for the Manager of Government Business in the Senate. I support the comments of my colleague Senator Cormann, and Senator Xenophon summed up what has happened. This is not an ambush. This morning we woke up and found that listed on today’s order of business was no bill, because it was stopped in the House of Representatives yesterday. The only politics being played in this are that the government are aware that we want to amend this bill and they have deliberately held it up in the House of Representatives so we cannot amend it. The only course for us to take is to fix it now with our own legislation, with the support of other concerned senators not necessarily from the Liberal or National parties but equally aggrieved and upset that this matter would not otherwise have been resolved.

The implementation will commence on 1 November—this weekend. Once we finalised this morning what we were going to do about this, we advised the government of the day. The stunt is that the government have not bothered to consult with us about holding this bill back in the House of Representatives. The only political argument that they have is absolutely false, because they are the ones playing games. We are responding to the government’s fear. The government is scared of introducing this bill, because we will amend it. We would have amended this bill successfully, and they were not prepared to run that test through the Senate chamber so they held it back. We have rectified that. The people of Australia will thank us for this because we will solve this problem. This weekend everyone will be sure about what is happening with the cataract rebate.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Cormann’s) be agreed to.