Gavin Marshall (Victoria, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

I do not intend to speak to the content of the report because we are about to go into the second reading debate on that, but I do want to make a point—and this is a general point—about the committee system within the Senate. Again, we were confronted with a very short time frame to conduct this inquiry. At the outset, the committee secretariat advised non-government senators that they would probably be in a position where no support would be provided to enable them to prepare a dissenting report. At the end of the day, there was some support provided. I thank the secretariat for doing that, but it actually resulted in a lot of work being done over the weekend and the final dissenting report not being concluded until 9.30 this morning.

I think this is a very unfortunate but all too common turn of events. It would appear that the Senate committee system is using all of its resources to simply do a chair's draft. The chair's draft, inevitably, will support the legislation. There are odd occasions when there are some suggested changes, but 999 times out of 1,000 the chair's draft will support the legislation and recommend that the bill be approved. That puts us in a position where the Senate committee system is simply becoming a rubber stamp for the government. I do not think that is why the Senate committee system was in fact established. I think it was established so we could have a fair dinkum review and look at the legislation before us and so alternate views could be put succinctly with the appropriate support from the committee secretariat—to put those alternate views, unintended consequences and other things that may not have been necessarily considered by the government.

I think it is not appropriate that the Senate committee system simply becomes a rubber stamp for the government in these circumstances. The government has enormous resources at its disposal when it actually creates the bill and brings it to the Senate. It does not need the Senate committee system to rubberstamp it. I think it is something, Mr President, that we need to have a very serious and careful look at. If there are resourcing problems—and of course there are—we need to address those problems in a way where non-government senators are supported.