Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Foreign Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to make just a few points, starting with the lack of necessity of the debate that we are having. We manage conflict and division in this chamber sometimes by doing everything precisely by the rules, using each ounce of the standing orders, including standing order rights to seek to suspend standing orders. But we also manage conflict and division in this chamber through the extension of courtesies and through the ability to work across party lines and manage that conflict. In this instance, Senator Ruston rose to seek to make a two-minute statement about the motion that has just been considered. It's not exactly an unprecedented move. It's one that has been done time and time again and one where this government has extended that courtesy on occasion where something has happened. Where a motion has been rammed through the Senate without any debate, it's extended the courtesy for a two-minute statement to be made by the opposition. Certainly, the previous government did the same thing time and again, managing the conflict in a way to achieve a courteous outcome that also ensured the smooth running of the chamber. Instead, on this occasion, leave was denied, and here we are now having a debate over the suspension of standing orders on the question of Senator Ruston being able to make a two-minute statement.

We've now spent close to eight minutes on the two-minute statement question, and it is unnecessary. It was asked for; it was even foreshadowed and yet the leave was denied, unnecessarily so. Why did Senator Ruston want to make a two-minute statement? She wanted to make clear points about what the chamber had just done without any debate occurring. The chamber had just significantly varied its hours and applied yet another guillotine by this government to a significant piece of policy. So yet another guillotine was applied by the government that promised it would treat the chamber with respect. It promised there would be greater transparency and accountability from them, but, no, it's another guillotining of legislation.

It's not legislation that is inconsequential, but legislation that entails billions of dollars of taxpayer money being committed. And the remarkable thing is that the totality of those billions of dollars keeps changing, from when the legislation was first introduced to now when it is being considered. Firstly, we had the fund that was all off budget, nothing to see here, nothing was touching the budget. But then more money was found, because the pressure came from the Greens. A billion dollars was found; $2 billion was found; $3 billion was found over the space of some weeks and months. It's like an auction was going on, with the government responding to the Greens' demands to find the extra cash that they were demanding.

There's little detail as to how those billions of dollars are going to be spent—just a promise that the government will shovel it out the door somehow to some effect. There's been little discussion about the actual detail of the fund, the off-budget fund that's being established, notwithstanding the fact that the country has significant debts, and the money is simply money that maintains and adds to the type of debt that is carried forward. They're trying to establish this like the Future Fund was established by the Howard and Costello governments but forget that the government had eliminated all debt at the time the Future Fund was established.

We've been clear all along that this is bad policy. It's bad policy to establish more of these sorts of funds. It's bad policy, because it does nothing to actually address the questions of home ownership. It's bad policy, because, insofar as it actually generates additional housing, it's a drop in the ocean and is contradicted by the government's anti-competitive, anti-productivity industrial relations and other agendas that will simply see challenges in the housing market get worse. But the policy will be debated in the limited time the government has now allowed through its deal with the Greens. The real question is, through that debate, why the government felt the need at the outset to act without the basic courtesies of the Senate—to ignore those—and to provoke the quite unnecessary debate in terms of how this chamber operates.