Matthew Canavan (Queensland, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I said 'sectional', as in a section or a part. When I got here a few months ago, we all as new senators were imbued with a lot of pride and honour. I made the point at the time—and someone told me this, because I did not know it—that this was the third largest intake of new senators in our nation's history after an election. There was a lot of talk of having a new set of crossbenchers to provide new clarity and scrutiny of the government—which I believe. I believe in this chamber. I believe in its right to exist. I believe in the merits of having a review mechanism. I said at the time, 'Well, maybe we will get a new culture. Perhaps we can make a difference.'

I believe that the country got sick and tired of what happened in the previous parliament. They got sick and tired of those overnight deals that were done, where you wake up the next morning and you have a different PM, you wake up the next morning and suddenly you have a carbon tax and you wake up the next morning and you have a major change to the EPBC Act—all because there were deals done behind the scenes without parliamentary scrutiny. So I was hopeful that perhaps that would change and that perhaps we would have proper committees and have legislation go through in a methodical way—exactly how the government has progressed with these changes through the committee process. But, unfortunately, some senators have not decided to go down that route; they are still continuing the dirty deals that were done in the former parliament—the dirty deals that were done by a former government and crossbenchers—which so dirtied this place, and the Australian people rejected it overwhelmingly last year.

I also said, 'If we do not change things as new senators, the Australian people will kick us out too, just like they did the last mob.' That is what they will do. They will get tired of us very quickly if we continue to behave in this way. Yesterday we were not going to disallow the financial advice reforms and today we are. What changed overnight? What changed in this country overnight? Was the temperature different? Did the water change? No, no; we just woke up and decided we were going to do a different thing. How does it give people out there any confidence in this place if every day we just decide to do different things, if we get out of a different side of the bed and we decide to change our laws? I think we should have more consistency than that. I recognise, Senator Muir, that it is hard; that there are lots of things that go through this place. But I also note that crossbenchers are given more advisers to help them, and we all have processes and ways of trying to assess these things. But to every day change our positions on things is the kind of culture—