Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr President. The Greens, it will come as no surprise, will not be supporting this motion to suspend standing orders. The government have failed to manage this place over the last period of sitting, to the extent where they were stacking their own bills. So, when they did not have the numbers, they started putting people on the speaking list. Because of their failed management of the chamber, they expect us to sit here late. We could go through a list of the times that the government have, in fact, used up the time of this Senate because they were not managing it properly. I will note just a few of them. For a start, there was the time when Senator Brandis refused to do his job as the Attorney-General and answer questions during committee-stage debate on the counter-terrorism bill. Senator Wright and Senator Ludlam were asking totally legitimate and very necessary questions over a critical piece of legislation in this place, and what did Senator Brandis do? He sat there and sat there. In fact, the video of that particularly poor performance is rather popular on the internet at the moment. Last time I looked, there had been 40-odd thousand views of that clip—and it is probably more by now. It was a classic example of where the government were refusing to answer questions on their own legislation. So they wasted valuable hours of government debating time, and here they are with their key law person of the country refusing—