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

The Greens will be supporting the amendment to refer the Parliamentary Services Amendment Bill 2014 to the Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee. We support the reporting date; we think 2 March is fair enough for reporting on this bill. We understood, when the bill was introduced by the President, that in fact there was an understanding that it would be referred to a committee for inquiry. I have been told subsequently that that is not what the President intended, which I am disappointed about, because I know the President does follow procedure really appropriately and that he is concerned that this place operate according to appropriate procedures. Therefore, I am a bit surprised that now the government are saying, 'We don't want to refer this particular bill.' It does have in it points that need to be reviewed, so I am concerned that the government have decided it should not be referred to a committee.

I also understand that the government thought the ALP were going to support the bill's passage through the Senate without referring it to a committee. I am sure the ALP will address that issue, given that I am not aware of those circumstances. However, I do know that the Greens are keen to see this bill reviewed by a committee because it is important that bills of this nature are reviewed. The Greens support the referral of bills to the committee process. There have been some exceptions to this, but, in general, when a party refers a bill for inquiry by a committee, that is nearly always supported. There have been some notable exceptions, and we have had stoushes about that in this place because there is a need for scrutiny of legislation that has potential implications. There are some exceptions; I agree with Senator Moore.

In fact, we are about to deal with one, in non-controversial legislation, and that is the Mr Fluffy bill—and we all know why it is essential that that bill be dealt with. But, as far as I am aware, this parliamentary service bill is not a time-bound bill. There is no requirement for it to be dealt with in an expeditious manner, unlike the bill that we have collectively agreed not to refer to a committee, which is the bill that addresses the issues around Mr Fluffy. Nobody would want to stand in the way of that process for compensation starting immediately and dealing with that issue of asbestos contamination. That is of course a sensible exception to referring bills to a committee, because it needs to be dealt with very quickly.

But, on the whole, we do support referrals, and the selection of bills process works this way: someone says, 'We want the bill to be referred,' and we then maybe quibble about the dates. But, on this bill, the government are not quibbling about the date; they are saying they do not want it referred. It is a bill that should be looked at because it is dealing with issues of security and, as I understand it, puts an additional person, an AFP member, on the security management board. We do think these issues need to be dealt with.

As I said, we do not see its urgency. Certainly, when it was introduced we were not given to understand that this was going to be an urgent bill—it was a bill that the President introduced, and I understand it came through the other place fairly quickly. That is not unusual. Sometimes bills do go through the other place quite quickly because the other place knows that the Senate is the house of review and that the Senate will, in fact, give bills a fair going-over in the committee process, because that is part of its job. We have an effective committee system on the whole—sometimes it does not function quite well when bills are rammed through this place and committees are given very short time lines to review them. But in this case the government are not even willing to give a short time line for this—they just do not want it reviewed. I must say, I find it quite unusual that they do not. As I said, the President usually is very keen to ensure that we are giving proper review to particular pieces of legislation.

If this bill is urgent, I think the government should be explaining why it is urgent. There has been no statement to say why this is urgent and why they do not want it referred—other than that we had a misunderstanding in this place. They say that we, the Greens and other senators who want this bill referred, had a misunderstanding of what the President wanted. Be that as it may, we think this bill should be referred to committee. We think this is an appropriate time line for it to be referred. It is not too long, but it gives us enough time to be able to look at the bill.