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

I thank Senator Xenophon for those supportive comments, which are true. In response to Senator Ronaldson—and I thank him for also acknowledging the importance of such legislation as this being passed in the parliament—it is not true that the bill makes the Auditor-General judge and jury. The beauty of this piece of legislation is that it gives the Auditor-General the ability to furnish parliament and the minister with an opinion, but the decision maker remains the government. But even that does not satisfy this government.

Senator Ludwig has said that the legislation is unconstitutional. How unsatisfactory is that contribution when it is not followed up with any reasoning. It is just an opinion floated in the air. The most debasing part of it is in relation to any parliamentary debate against legislation where members get up—and I have seen this for decades—and say the bill is badly drawn, hastily done or does not fit some unspecified constitutional parameter. That is not an argument; that is specious. If we are to have a proper debate about why legislation like this should not be debated now and rapidly put through the parliament, as are so many pieces of government legislation this week, courtesy of the crossbench as well as the opposition, the government needs to come up with a better argument than that.

Senator Ludwig also said that there was a short committee process. As I pointed out in my submission, we are dealing with a number of important pieces of government legislation here which have had no committee process at all, let alone public debate. As you will know, there has been widespread public debate on this issue. Four major commentators on this legislation, including the Auditor-General himself, have favoured this legislation proceeding, and have offered recommendations—and I have amendments to accord with the suggestions of the Auditor-General—for this legislation, which is now not going to pass because the government and the opposition oppose it.

I would remind the government that in October last year when the sitting times for this year for the Senate were laid down by the government, the Greens pointed out that it was one of the shortest sitting periods set down for a Senate year in history. It was totally unsatisfactory and we moved for an extra four sitting weeks of the Senate, but both the government and the opposition voted that down. Two of those weeks would have been in April and two would have been in August. We would have had plenty of time to debate at length, with fuller committee and public consideration, all the pieces of legislation which are being rushed through, mostly by the government, this week. No, the difficulty we have in getting proper vetting of legislation rests wholly on the shoulders of Senator Ludwig and the government, because they have refused to have this Senate have the sitting times which are appropriate to dealing with the large legislative slate. I have no doubt that, come Thursday, the government is going to say that lots of pieces of legislation have not been dealt with. That is totally a situation of the government’s own manufacture.

The argument used by Senator Ludwig has no internal coherence or logic at all. I might remind the Senate that there are 31 private senators’ bills waiting to be dealt with in this place. They are important bills. There are bills on the improvement of democracy, the performance of the Senate, the wellbeing of Indigenous Australians, environment protection, the promotion of climate change issues and a whole range of other issues that deal with people. These bills ought to have passed this parliament but there is no time to deal with them. This is not only because we do not have private senators’ time—and I have tried very hard to get that up, but that has been blocked as well through the committee system—but because there is no time even to deal adequately with government legislation. That is the responsibility of this government. It is totally on its shoulders. I am very pleased that we have had this debate. I recommend this suspension so that this chamber can pass this important legislation.

Question put:

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