Christine Milne (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens do not think that this is a matter of sufficient urgency to suspend standing orders in order to bring on what is effectively a shutdown of the debate on marriage equality, to change the sitting hours tomorrow and to provide for us sitting until very late tomorrow night, presumably—that is, to change the whole sitting arrangements in the Senate in order to bring to a vote the issue of marriage equality.

We have already seen this in a most unprecedented manner in the House of Representatives, where the House procedures were completely changed and disrupted—in an unprecedented manner in there too, I might add—and the reason given by Mr Albanese at the time was that it would allow the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition to make statements on this issue. That is why all the procedures had to be changed in the House of Representatives—to facilitate the Prime Minister making a statement and the Leader of the Opposition making a statement on their positions on marriage equality, and it did not happen. Extraordinary—isn't it?—that you would change the whole of the procedures in the House of Representatives to facilitate statements being made and the statements never happened! What an extraordinary thing that neither the Prime Minister nor the Leader of the Opposition actually spoke on the issue which was so important to bring on for a vote and which required them to actually change those standing orders and procedures in order that that occur.

We are not going to agree to the same thing here; there is no rush for this to be brought on and put to a vote tomorrow. There is certainly no rush and no reason to change the way we do business on Thursdays and keep us all here on the basis of getting a vote on this bill. This whole strategy is very clearly a strategy to coordinate the vote in the House of Representatives and in the Senate so that an attempt to shut down the debate can be made by both the government and the coalition, who have got together to agree to change the way we do business on Thursdays to facilitate this occurring. The Greens do not intend to facilitate that happening. We recognise that a deal has been done between the government and the coalition to change the business of tomorrow so that the consideration of general business and the private senators' time will be altered such that after the marriage equality bill we will then have to sit here for the time it takes to get through whatever the coalition wants to debate up until whatever time they choose to debate it.

You would argue that that you would only do something like that if it was a genuine matter of urgency to bring this matter to a debate and to a vote. There is no genuine matter of urgency on this particular piece of legislation for it getting to a vote tomorrow, Thursday. On a Thursday we normally do not have votes and divisions after 4.30 pm. We would not normally do this, so why? What is the urgency? I think it is up to the government and the coalition to explain why we have to stay here tomorrow night, why we have to have votes and divisions after 4.30, why we have to change our procedures and why the coalition is giving up its private members' time in the morning to facilitate debate after that time in the evening. It is simply to allow the Prime Minister and the Leader of the Opposition, who have failed to get to their feet and make statements in relation to marriage equality at all—which I think is really offensive to the people around Australia who have been campaigning so long and hard for marriage equality, people who thought they might get a statement from the Prime Minister or from the Leader of the Opposition, on the record and in the parliament, of what their actual views are.

As I said before, Mr Albanese put forward in the House of Representatives the view that the reason for the change was to allow those statements to be made, and they were not made.

All of the families around Australia who are listening and following this debate will be horrified to know that there has been this attempt to change the way the parliament works in order to bring to a vote something for which there is no urgency at all. We should be able to debate this in the normal hours of the parliament sitting, and that is what the Greens believe ought to occur.