Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations) Share this | Hansard source

It is being referred today and by what date would the committee need to report? The reporting date is Monday, 25 June—that is, less than seven days to consider the bill. This is a classic example of the Labor Party saying, 'Sure we are sending this bill to the committee,' but the parliament will be sitting on Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, according to this motion. Can you tell us when the committee will have time to consider the bill? That would be on Saturday and Sunday, of course, so that we can report on Monday and have the bill passed with due process! You know, Manager of Government Business, that this is nonsense. You know that the Australian people do not accept that, especially when the Labor Party and the Greens were so outspoken in relation to the small number of guillotines under the Howard government. I say to Senator Milne and Senator Collins that it is not by your words that you will be judged; it will be by your votes and you have voted for six times as many bills to be guillotined than the number of bills guillotined under the Howard government.

Let us return to the bill that will be guillotined and slid through this place. I wonder why it is that Labor are so anxious to guillotine this bill to ensure that we have only three hours of debate. In fact, I am not even sure whether we will have three hours of debate, with or without a dinner break. We will have only three hours of discussion about the failures of Fair Work Australia and Mr Bill Shorten's bill. Mr Bill Shorten is an ex-union boss who is trying to cover up for union bosses' mismanagement, to put it politely—'abuse' would be a better word—of hard-working union members' money. We have ex-union bosses coming up with a regime which is a smokescreen to be administered by another ex-union boss, to ensure that we have accountability from union bosses! I do not think so. No wonder the Labor Party want to sneak that one through and conveniently put it into the parliamentary timetable between 5 pm and 8 pm to ensure that the evening news bulletins will all be too late to have it mentioned and by the next day, with a 24-hour news cycle, of course it will be old news. That is the way the Labor Party play their game of politics in this place. It is a disgrace and we as a coalition will continue to stand up to ensure proper accountability. Having said that, I fully accept, and the coalition fully accepts, that from time to time a guillotine is required. We have moved them. The question is in the sense of proportion: how often you do it and why you do it. Whilst the coalition had control of the Senate—and I stress this—36 bills were so guillotined. Under this Greens-Labor alliance controlled Senate, we will have, as a result of proceedings ending next week, over 110 bills guillotined in about 20 months of the parliament. So, if we have even more time with this Greens-Labor alliance, we will undoubtedly see a lot more guillotining of legislation.

We will also see the demise of government documents being considered and the demise of matters of public importance—times interest.