Rachel Siewert (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

It was the Greens that helped establish this very process. This process came into being so that this place had time to consider bills when they came in and to stop exactly what this government's trying to do, which is to ram this through this place before we can have proper consideration of this bill and its implications. What is the government scared of in allowing this to get proper scrutiny by the community—in fact, by the very community that this government says that it is trying to help? Let them have a proper look at this legislation, so that we know that they think it's the right legislation. Allow proper scrutiny of this so that a committee reviewing this can actually have advice from the community and from the experts in this area. And, as Senator Rice has just said, we have amendments. We'd be happy to circulate those as well so that people could have a look at those in the committee.

But, no, the government's too scared of scrutiny. They just want to ram this through at a moment's notice, trashing the Senate's processes—which is what this is about. This process is in place to allow this chamber to perform its proper role. The Senate is the place where we review legislation, where we give it proper attention, where we find out if it's going to work, where we find out if it needs amendments and where we find out if it's actually going to do what the government says it's going to do. And, shock, horror; it wouldn't be the first time if we found that processes aren't going to work. We've found that many times in committee. Governments don't always take on board amendments, but very often they do.

What you're trying to do is ram this through. What are you scared of? What's in there that you don't want the community and this place to scrutinise properly? This is an abuse of the process. It should not be exempt from the cut-off order. It should go through the proper process in this particular House of our parliament. We are opposing this. It is an abuse of process.