Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

In that case, I'm sure Senator Hanson-Young will find another way to deal with it. With regard to the motion, certainly it's something that the Greens are not going to oppose. It looked like Senator Gallacher might want to speak to the motion as well, although if the purpose of the motion was to spend one minute talking about the need to extend the committee's reporting date and nine minutes slagging off another senator without warning them, then to complain about me and to try to prevent me from responding to those attacks, again, is hardly an act of collegiateness or allowing people to put their side of the story.

If we do want to talk about ensuring our committees operate in a collegiate way, I'm sure all of us could point to multiple examples of people from other parties in this place making allegations far more serious than what seems to have got under the skin of Senator O'Sullivan, including people from the government side who are actually chairs of committees. If you want to look at trying to clean up behaviour with regard to Senate committees, don't worry about the specks in other people's eyes and look at the log in your own. I suggest that would be the way to go. There is plenty of cleaning up to do with regard to, particularly, one government member who is a chair of the committee. I won't single them out and name them, because I don't want to send this off down another tangent. But there is plenty of room for improvement for people on all sides.

I hope this newfound principle of polite behaviour that Senator O'Sullivan is putting forward to us all is a creed that he's sowing amongst his colleagues as well, going around the various committees and saying that we need to be more collegiate in the way we behave in committee hearings. I'll go along with him if he likes, through some of the different committees—around estimates time perhaps, when we see some unduly harsh and combative behaviour by fellow government or Labor senators. I'll be there with him in the spirit of collegiality and improving behaviour for everybody. If he wants to put that principle out there, then let's see how well it's followed by his colleagues.