Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister Assisting the Leader for Science) Share this | Hansard source

I do not doubt the good intentions of Senator Lazarus. This is not a point that has been raised by anyone other than you, Senator Birmingham. I have raised the simple question about what happens when you try to do these sorts of things on the fly, overnight, without proper consideration of the consequences. I know what the deal is here. Senator Lazarus has been decent enough to outline it. The government will vote for this amendment no matter how ill conceived and no matter what the technical problems are, which the department knows only too well and the minister knows only too well. The government will ask Senator Lazarus to vote against our propositions, which actually do fix the problem properly in a coherent way, in return for this proposition, which I say is not just for this minister—you might have an undertaking with this minister—but for the secretaries and secretaries to come.

Remember, there is no provision in this bill for a sunset clause. These provisions will stay until such time as we have to rewrite the bill at some point in the future. I think this minister is going to have some trouble getting together a new package within a year, given that we will have an election in the middle of it, which of course is the real question we have before us today. What is the real issue here? Why have we got all these amendments so late? It is because the government wants to close down public debate about these issues in the run-up to the election.

What we have, though, is a proposition, Senator Lazarus, that I do not think meets your criteria but will open up a whole series of other abuses in the future, so I am a bit concerned about that. I do not know if I could support, or recommend to my colleagues to support, such a proposition, given the way it has just been dropped on us now. That follows the pattern that I think we have seen from the government—this colossal amount of new material being presented to us today.