Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

To be absolutely clear, the Greens support withdrawing the sex discrimination amendment from today's order of business. We support pulling this bill because this bill, as amended by the government with the support of Centre Alliance, would entrench and increase discrimination rather than reduce it. I want to make this point very, very clear: we do support ensuring that we have legislation before this parliament that prevents schools from expelling students on the basis of their gender or sexuality—their gender identity or sexual orientation—but we also support legislation that would prevent teachers from being expelled or sacked on the basis of gender and sexual orientation.

But let me also say this in the time that I've got left: this motion seeks to ram through a long list of legislation without us being given the opportunity to give due consideration to each of these bills. We understand that some of these bills have been amended to, for example, give tax deductibility status—I'm looking at the Treasury laws amendment—to a whole range of organisations that we don't believe deserve that status. Yet, we now have an hour and a half to have a substantive debate on half a dozen bills that have not had the scrutiny that they deserve. So, while we support withdrawing the sex discrimination amendment, we don't support ramming through a long list of bills that haven't had the scrutiny that they deserve. (Time expired)