Jonathon Duniam (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Environment, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

No doubt we will have an extensive committee stage on the constitutional alteration bill, because there are many important questions that the people of Australia have asked the opposition to put on the record because they can't get the answers to these questions. Of course, it's an open-ended debate, but wouldn't it be better to be doing it while the sun is still up rather than late into the night? If we structured the agenda appropriately—and the Australian Greens could be a party to this as well—we'd be able to facilitate that, rather than sign up to the agenda here that the Australian government put in place. They signed up the Australian Greens in truncating that debate.

I don't accept that it's an either/or proposition. If you shut up on these bills, don't interrogate them, don't have a look at what's being proposed here and just let them sail through with no debate, no questions, no scrutiny and no interrogation of the facts, you can get on with the other one. This is exactly what they've done. They've structured it this way so that we do shut down debate, there is no interrogation of the facts and there's no scrutiny of the government. It's an either/or proposition; you can't have both.