Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

No, the recess is five weeks. People talking of seven weeks are including this week and budget week. But we do—numbers aside—agree with the government that there are a whole heap of processes that are held back behind the passage of this legislation, which, let us recall, is the enabling legislation around the NBN. This infrastructure project is being built in the absence of the kinds of provisions that these bills seek to introduce—and that means a company working in a legislative vacuum, trying to put together an arrangement with Telstra for taking on their assets and their traffic.

The only thing I suppose that I should agree with Senator Abetz on in his comments a few moments ago is that these amendments are of substance. I am not going to stand here this morning and say that they are inconsequential and we should just wave them through. Senator Abetz and Senator Fifield before him spoke about how they would be here to provide scrutiny and analysis of these amendments. We will be here as well. I am not proposing legislation by exhaustion or by attrition; I think that is an extraordinarily poor way to pass bills. But we will be here for as long as this debate takes because I do agree that these amendments have substance.

I will put on the record at this stage, without going into too much detail because I gather we are going to have plenty of time to go into the detail, that some of the amendments have been put forward as a result of negotiations with a large number of participants in the industry and are things that the Senate committee called for and that the Australian Greens have been calling for. Let us remember that this has not just happened overnight. There was an exposure draft of this bill in the public domain for a long period of time. A number of very important issues were resolved out of that process of delivering an exposure draft and now we have the legislation that is before us. Serious concerns were raised about the bill inside and outside of the committee process and now we have a package of amendments that attempts to address many of those concerns.

I will acknowledge that new concerns have been raised as a result of the package of amendments we have in front of us now, but it looks as though we are going to have plenty of time to debate those in detail. So we will be supporting this hours motion and I look forward to not being here on the weekend.