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

I foreshadow that I will move the following amendment to the amendment moved by Senator Dastyari:

At the end of the amendment, add, "and,

(1) in respect of the provisions of the Budget Saving (Omnibus) Bill 2016, the Economics Legislation Committee report by 10 October 2016.

This is a bill that literally has dozens of clauses and amendments in it that need serious review. Some of those have not been considered by this chamber or by a committee inquiry and they deserve very close attention. For example, there are aged care amendments. The energy supplement was an amendment that came in through the 2016-17 budget. We had the ridiculous two-day estimates review where we tried to cram in two weeks of review. We know that is going to have a significant impact on people that are living on Newstart.

There are many other amendments in this Budget Saving (Omnibus) Bill 2016 that community organisations cannot possibly get their heads around, get their submissions in and be able to appear before a Senate committee in the time that the government wants them to. They need adequate time to be able to sit down and look at all the provisions in this omnibus bill. They only saw it this week. There is no way they can get their heads around all those different provisions, particularly as there will be so many stakeholders and there is so much contained in that one bill that the government is trying to ram through. We need adequate time in this chamber to review those provisions. The government cannot run the line that these measures have been reviewed before because many of them were contained in the budget that came through in May, which has never been properly subjected to any proper estimates scrutiny or any proper scrutiny by a Senate committee. It needs adequate time for review. That is why we foreshadow moving this amendment to Senator Dastyari's amendments. I will indicate—and I think Senator Di Natale will make a contribution—that we will be supporting Senator Dastyari's amendments, not the government's amendments, but we will be seeking to amend them further.