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

I move:

Insert “questions without Notice” before “petitions” in paragraph (c)

I move this amendment feeling assured that there will be coalition support, because the one pivotal thing in an age of government by executive, with every effort made by prime ministers and executives these days to sideline parliament, is that the government be put under scrutiny by parliament as best it can. Of course, question time is the pivotal hour for that scrutiny. We Greens have repeatedly been champions of question time being held so that the government can be put under scrutiny, and we have been repeatedly bemused by the fact that the government and opposition do not support that. It is time that the opposition reviewed that position.

Question time tomorrow ought to follow the luncheon break after the presentation to the House of Representatives by Indonesian President Yudhoyono. Question time should be on this list, but it is missing. We should have question time at four o’clock and then follow on with the other matters, including petitions, which I know no senator will want to see set aside. But I think there is no senator who would agree that questions are more important than petitions in the lively scrutiny of the government’s performance, so this amendment by the Greens is a serious one to ensure that question time takes place tomorrow.

I take the opportunity to explain to any members of the media who are listening that tomorrow’s sitting is not a joint house sitting and that following the visit of President Bush in 2003—when I spoke to President Bush on the floor of the House of Representatives and my colleague the then Greens senator Kerry Nettle did the same—it was found, as former Clerk of the Senate Harry Evans repeatedly put, that there were no provisions for a joint house sitting in this parliament, and we were left in the invidious position of a Speaker of the house trying to direct senators what to do in a joint house sitting while having no authority to make any such direction.

We will be invited to join the House of Representatives, but we are effectively going as visitors to the House, which will be meeting to hear President Yudhoyono tomorrow. It is not a joint house sitting; it is a sitting of the House of Representatives to which senators are invited—a very important point that some scribes in the press gallery have not, I think, been able to understand. That said, question time is the pivotal opportunity for we senators to question the government, and I think the coalition ought to seriously consider supporting this amendment by the Greens.