Rex Patrick (SA, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I just want to go back to the Cairns registry and the comments made by Senator Green in terms of her listening to her constituents and to people in her community. That is indeed what I do. I know that she does work actively in her community. I might put on the record that I attended all of the hearings in the last parliament in relation to this bill, which caused it to be substantially changed, basically to the form that it is now. But even over the last couple of weeks, I have spoken to people from the Law Council, I've spoken to justices of the court, I've spoken to community legal services, and I have spoken, indeed, to the Chief Justice of the Family Court, to the Deputy Chief Justice and to the former Attorney-General under the Labor government who introduced the bill. I won't go to the details of the conversation with the Chief Justice, but I asked them to guide me in whether or not this bill would help them, and the impression that I walked away with was that it would.

The difference perhaps between what I've done and what Senator Green may have done is that, having received all the information that was provided to me as I listened to the community and various different stakeholders, I then turned and walked to the Attorney-General's office and had a conversation, one of many conversations, with the Attorney-General. Indeed, I also recall having a conversation with the assistant minister outside the chamber just recently about this bill as well.

There are two parts of what you need to do. You need to listen to the community and then you need to actually go to the people in power. That's a different prospect to probably what happens normally, where you go to caucus and you complain and you work up tactics and all those sorts of things. That's not how you successfully advocate for your state. What you do is you pick up the phone and say, 'I would like to speak to the Attorney-General. I'm a senator for Queensland.' I am sure that you would get an audience. That's how you properly represent your state.

So I might ask the same question of the assistant minister, who is a Queenslander, so no doubt shares lots of common views. I would ask the assistant minister: how many times has Senator Green wandered up to you and sought a meeting in respect of court-related matters in Cairns?