Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

I am not actually speaking to that. We are very keen to progress this debate. It is an important piece of legislation. The opposition has some very sensible amendments that we want to move. I am conscious that no more of my coalition colleagues want to speak on the Greens amendments. Perhaps Senator Ludlam has a response to the questions that were asked, although he was out of the chamber when they were being asked, so I suspect he will not be able to. If he did that, then we could actually vote on Senator Ludlam’s amendments.

We are still getting new amendments as we speak. Senator Conroy suggested that we have had a year to look at this, but, here we are, a minute before voting and we are still getting new amendments. Clearly, we have not had a year. In fact, we have not had a month, we have not had a week, we have not had a day. We will end up having about half an hour to look at the amendments as they come in. I am not being critical of that except to say that Senator Conroy’s hyperbole about having had a year is clearly false.

I urge the Senate to deal with Senator Ludlam’s amendments so that we can move on to the coalition amendments, which are listed next, and then, hopefully, we will get to Senator Xenophon’s amendments, which seem interesting. That is the course of action I urge upon the Senate.

Just to recapitulate: the coalition will not be supporting Senator Ludlam’s amendments, but we are very keen to progress this debate. We do not want to filibuster and keep this debate going in the way the Labor Party have been proceeding. We want to move on. We are very keen to do that. I am looking forward to moving our amendments. We will not be dividing, unlike the Greens, who divide on everything and waste so much time in doing that. We will not do that, because we are very keen to make sure the Senate has the maximum amount of time.