Lee Rhiannon (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, Mr Chairman. Could you please explain what just happened? I have never seen that process.

The CHAIRMAN: Certainly. The government has just moved for an extension of time to consider this bill, I presume in the anticipation of completing the bill before we rise this evening. To do that we had to move out of committee stage, and now we have moved back into committee. That is how I get my exercise for the day!

So we are back to where we were?

The CHAIRMAN: Exactly, we are back to where we were but we had to go through that formality, otherwise the debate would have expired at 6.50pm.

Thank you for the explanation, Mr Chairman. I was interested in the comments made earlier, particularly by Senator Ryan. I am not doubting his passion and his interest in the constitution, but what we have here tonight is a whole number of excuses being used. There are heavy spoiler tactics going on around this important legislation. We have heard many comments being made—concerns about the constitution, the need for good process, the need for a commitment to ensure the machinery really works. But when you listen closely to what has been said, and when you remember how it played out today—initially there was only one speaker from the coalition and one from the Labor government, because this was supposed to be noncontroversial legislation—there was clearly an agenda going on. Yes, anybody can come in here and speak. It is one of the wonderful things about our parliaments in Australia. As Senator Ryan said, all of his party members—like all of us—are entitled to their opinion. But what we saw today in so many of the comments from the coalition was very worrying for a party that states that there is bipartisan support for this bill.

We are starting to see various guerrilla tactics going on here—throwing bombs out to be very disruptive about this important process to get the machinery in place for this referendum. We are running out of time. The process has not been perfect, but what is going on here is very troubling. To take just one of the arguments that Senator Ryan sets out, on the one hand he says that they want to spend $10 million on taking forward the campaign for the two cases but then on the other hand he says not to expect them to say, 'Well, that has saved $4 million'. Isn't that being responsible? There is a clear contradiction in how that is argued. Surely that is actually improving the management of this budget. Then we hear the senator again trying to justify his position by arguing that we have not got details of the criteria or the caps. I started thinking that the next thing would be him wanting to know what papers the advertisements would appear in, or how big the leaflet would be—would it be a DL or would it be an A5? He was getting down to a level of detail that is clearly a spoiler tactic.

I think the question that Senator Ryan needs to answer here is: what will he be saying when this campaign on the referendum gets going? Is he still going to be running a spoiler campaign? Is he going to say: 'Well, it was not done properly. We had this discussion in the Senate, the legislation was rushed and the machinery wasn't any good.'? Nothing is perfect in this world. Is he going to get up there and follow through on the supposed bipartisan commitment that we sometimes hear coming from the coalition? From the sum of the comments I have heard from coalition senators today, I certainly did not feel confident that any of them would be following through with that message. I found it interesting that few National Party senators spoke on this issue. My guess is that they are hearing from their constituents that their constituents really want it. But it looks like the message coming from the majority of the coalition is to be disruptive on this at all costs.

This is not perfect but we have a chance here and, Senator Ryan, you know we can get this through if the coalition would take a tripartisan, multi-party approach to this. Let us get this through, let us get out in the community and get this done. We have the opportunity and we should not ruin it.