Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

No! You cannot have it both ways. You cannot say, 'We're pulling three days out of the parliamentary sitting schedule next week and we're instituting a guillotine each night of this week on 33 bills, but the reason you don't have enough time to debate is that you're actually debating the motion which is seeking to deny sitting days.' No, the reason we do not have adequate time to debate is that you have instituted a guillotine; the reason we do not have time to debate is that you are axing three sitting days next week. Us being here performing the function of seeking to defeat a motion which is intended to deny the chamber three sitting days next week is not the reason we will not have adequate time to debate. That is perhaps the most pathetic and feeble argument I have heard Senator Sherry put—and Senator Ludwig for that matter. Let us be clear: we want to defeat this motion. We are endeavouring to persuade those opposite to defeat this motion. We are endeavouring to persuade the Australian Greens to defeat this motion. It is this very motion which is denying the Senate the opportunity to apply appropriate scrutiny to bills. The reason we have this truncated debate is that we are being squeezed between a guillotine and an axe intended to do away with the sitting days next week. So Senator Sherry and Senator Ludwig, if you are going to mount an argument, please do a little better than that. It would be appreciated.

We want the Senate to sit as scheduled next week for two reasons. The first reason is that this chamber still has legislation to debate. If we were sitting for three days next week there would be no need for the guillotine which is in place this week. We are a house of review and we should do our job. We should apply scrutiny, we should ask the appropriate questions of government ministers in the committee stage and we should hold the government to account. That is the first reason the Senate should still sit next week.

The second reason is that the government will be releasing very shortly their Mid-Year Economic and Financial Outlook, the MYEFO. But this year the MYEFO is in effect going to be a minibudget. This government has made a lot of its commitment to bring the budget back into surplus in 2012-13. Well, it was a commitment, but it has slipped and slided a bit since then. It became an objective, it became an aim, it became a hope, it became a dream and it became a fantasy—and now it has come back to being an objective. I still think it will end up being a fantasy, but we will have to wait and see.

The government have placed great emphasis on that commitment to a surplus as being the foundation of their economic credibility. But the deterioration in the state of the budget is not because of revenue shortfalls—although that is what the government always cites—but because of policy decisions by this government. What that means is spending; it means decisions taken by this government to spend more money, more money than they received in taxation revenue. That is why the budget is going pear-shaped. That is why the MYEFO next week is going to be more in the style of a minibudget than a mere economic update. A minibudget of that significance needs to be appropriately examined, and the place for it to be appropriately examined is here in the Australian Senate and over in the other place. The government should do two things. Firstly, they should withdraw this motion and allow the Senate to sit next week, as scheduled, on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday. Secondly, they should recall the House of Representatives so that it too can examine the MYEFO. There are two reasons that the Australian Senate should sit as scheduled—to allow it to do its job of examining legislation in order that it can do its job of being the house of review and to allow the House of Representatives to re-examine the MYEFO. I add a third reason: to allow us have the question times which were scheduled for next week. Question time in this Senate and in the other place is one of the great accountability mechanisms of the Westminster system. We have a few more accountability mechanisms in the Australian Senate. We have our estimates committee system, which is the envy of parliaments around the world and is a robust and fantastic accountability mechanism, but the centrepiece of government accountability to the parliament under the Westminster system is question time, and we and the Australian public will be denied three question times—on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday—next week.

It is not as though this is a particularly good government. You might not concede that, Madam Acting Deputy President Stephens, but I think the majority of the Australian public would agree with it. Governments which are this bad need scrutiny. They need the scrutiny of question time and the opportunity it affords to shine the light upon them, and that opportunity will be denied us next week. We need to have those question times next week because this government should go scarcely a day without examination. It is bad enough already that the Australian parliament this year is sitting on fewer days than in almost any non-election year in its history, but this government is seeking to further curtail the number of days that the parliament sits and further curtail the opportunities for scrutiny through question time.

We need to have the opportunity to continue to examine this government for a number of reasons. This government has perfected the crafting of bad policy—they have made an art form of it. You will recall, Madam Acting Deputy President, Fuelwatch and GroceryWatch. One of those got up for a while, and the other never got off the ground. They were very badly crafted policies. This government's border protection policy is a debacle. This government has made an art form of bad policy, and one of the reasons that we need to have the Senate sitting and to have question time is so that we can continue to examine and probe bad policy. Another reason that we need to have those question times is that, although this government's policy crafting is bad, they are even worse at implementing it. So there is bad policy, which is not a great way to start, and then there is absolute incompetence in administering that bad policy. There is hopelessness on top of bad conception, and it is a really bad combination. We need to have the opportunity in this place, in question time, to find out if there are further administrative blunders—to try to protect the government from themselves and to try to expose some of this bad policy before it goes too far. We need to have the opportunity to ask about badly crafted policy; we need to have the opportunity to inquire about program administration.