George Brandis (Queensland, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to move a motion to vary the hours of meeting and routine of business for today and tomorrow.

Leave not granted.

Pursuant to contingent notice standing in my name, I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent me moving a motion to provide for the consideration of a matter, namely a motion to provide that a motion relating to the hours of meeting and routine of business for today and tomorrow may be moved immediately and determined without amendment.

The purpose of this motion is to enable the Senate to get on with the business the people sent us here to do. We are in the course of the debate on the Building and Construction Industry (Improving Productivity) Bill and a related bill—the so-called ABCC bills. We have known from day one that the Australian Labor Party and their allies the Greens would do everything they possibly could to frustrate this debate to prevent the debate from being conducted and coming to a resolution this week. Why, one wonders?

Let it not be forgotten that this is one of the two bills that the government took to the people at the election on 2 July. This is one of the two bills that were the famous trigger bills for the double dissolution. We took advantage of the mechanism provided for by section 57 of the Constitution. We won the election and now we seek the passage through the parliament of the two bills which justified the double dissolution election and on which the public voted in voting on that election.

We know that the Australian Labor Party, with its shrinking base, is more and more, these days, the captive slave of a dwindling number of militant trade unions. We know, in particular, that there are Labor senators in this chamber, led by Senator Penny Wong, who owe their position here, as does Senator Wong herself, to the patronage and political support of the CFMEU. Those who do not owe their position to the patronage and the support of the CFMEU owe it—every last man and woman among them—to other trade unions.