Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Government in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

The government opposes Senator Brown’s suspension motion. The longstanding precedent in this parliament in both chambers has been that, if the opposition seek to move a suspension motion, that suspension motion is debated and, if the time for question time has expired, we do not return to question time. The opposition chose today to move a censure motion fairly early in question time, I acknowledge. The government chose to take that suspension motion rather than defeat it procedurally. Senator Brown may have preferred that we not do that. I understand that; that is a perfectly reasonable position. But the government’s view was that we would rather debate the merits of the case than debate the procedure, so we took that course, and I appreciate the support of the Independents and Greens for the defeat of that censure motion.

To be fair to Senator Brown, he has argued this position before, so I am not arguing that he is not consistent in it, but the reality is that what he is asking is that sometime around half past five I try and round up whichever ministers are still in the building and available and we have another go at question time. Ministers, like all other members of parliament, plan their day around question time being between two o’clock and three o’clock in the afternoon. One of the great things that the Senate has done is that we have always called question time to a halt at three o’clock rather than letting it drag on, as it does in the House of Representatives under certain arrangements. Under successive governments of both persuasions, we have run a more orderly and timely question time process. To suggest that some time, whenever we get around to it, we call question time back on again and hope that ministers turn up, have their briefs and are ready to go is, quite frankly, not very practical. We have a cabinet meeting scheduled shortly which cabinet ministers—and I think there are five in the Senate—are required to attend. It would be a total disruption of the cabinet and government processes—