Nick McKim (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

No, they have not been a passion of yours, Senator Brandis. You are a latecomer to this. It is Senator Paterson and other agents of the IPA in this place who have taken this on as a passion and driven it to where it is now, where it is going to go down when the substantive vote comes up on changes to 18C.

We think this does deserve a proper inquiry for the reason that there are issues contained in this legislation that were not even canvassed in the human rights committee report. They were not even mentioned. For example, no-one mentioned amendments to the Native Title Act, and here we see this bill, and there is an amendment to the Native Title Act contained in the bill. It was not the subject of a single submission to the committee and not the subject of a single reference in the committee's report or in any of the dissenting or additional comments that were made by committee members, and here we are with an amendment to the Native Title Act in this legislation.

And there are amendments to the processes of the Human Rights Commission which, again, were not canvassed in the committee's processes and were not canvassed in the committee's report. Let us be very clear about this: the government want to bring it on as a matter of urgency because they just want to clear the decks of the embarrassment that this issue has become for them and because they know that there are significant divisions in their own party room and their own caucus on this matter.

The Greens want to see a proper, ridgy-didge inquiry into this legislation so that we can look at the range of issues that were not canvassed during the human rights committee process which should be canvassed by this place, noting that the human rights committee did not recommend the provisions that are contained within this bill. We think that a reporting date in early May is a reasonable date. We will not support the amendment, because we think the inquiry will not be long enough.