David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I want to thank the crossbench members for signing on to this. I also really want to thank Rachel Callinan for the last couple of years and now Toni Matulick for the way that they and their teams assist with drafting and I want to echo the words that have been said about just how tirelessly this small team works for our democracy. I want to add my voice saying that it is not good enough when, as an elected representative, you cannot get a private senator's bill drafted, when you cannot get amendments that are based on what you're hearing from experts when they have concerns about a government bill, when you're hearing from people that you represent and you want to move amendments that reflect that and when you've got a government that seems intent on dropping hundreds of pages of legislation, forgoing all parliamentary scrutiny and ramming it through while you cannot move amendments. This is not good for our democracy, so I urge the government to address this.

You're very happy to cop an extra $20 million at election time to give yourselves $30,000 per sitting member per year to go to the party for administration costs. Let's put some money into the actual parliament so that we can do our jobs better and we can better reflect the communities that we're here for. The reality is that we have a growing crossbench. Australians want more competition. They want a diversity of views, and that means that we need to be able to move amendments to legislation, so I hope that the government will finally take this seriously.

I note that over the last two years crossbenchers have consistently raised this at estimates and have written letters to the President. It shouldn't take the crossbench having to delay the Senate in the last two sitting weeks, when we have this massive crunch of 20 bills and the government willing to forgo any sort of parliamentary scrutiny of inquiries, to raise this and to bring this to the Senate's attention.

Again, I thank fellow crossbenchers and hope that the government takes this seriously.