Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for the Murray Darling Basin) Share this | Hansard source

Last night we witnessed an extraordinary situation where the government's guillotine stopped its own minister from being able to make a ministerial statement. That ministerial statement was then tabled in this place in a manner that provided no opportunity, as ministerial statements usually do, for the opposition to respond. That is of grave concern because the ministerial statement made by Senator Conroy once again poses far more questions than it does answers. Those questions can only be transparently and rightly dealt with through a proper, open parliamentary inquiry. This is exactly what select committees were established for, and I would urge, particularly given the extraordinary nature of Senator Conroy's statement, and the content of that statement that has already been highlighted by others as false or misleading in some ways, that the chamber support this motion.