Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to move the government’s motion on varying the hours of meeting and routine of business this week.

Alan Ferguson (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Leave is granted for 10 minutes.

Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

That—

(1)

On Thursday, 17 June 2010:

(a)

the hours of meeting shall be 9.30 am to 6.30 pm and 7.30 pm to adjournment;

(b)

the routine of business from 7.30 pm shall be government business only;

(c)

divisions may take place after 4.30 pm; and

(d)

if the Senate is sitting at 10 pm, the sitting of the Senate be suspended till 9 am on Friday, 18 June 2010.

(2)

On Friday, 18 June 2010, the question for the adjournment of the Senate shall be put at 1.30 pm.

I will not take long. It is important for the Senate to get on with the business of the Senate and the legislative agenda that we are seeking to progress. It is with regret that I recognise that a number in the chamber do not support additional hours for the government business this week. I will recap what happens when we get to the end of the winter session. It is not unusual, and it was usual during that time when we were in opposition, for the government of the day to ask for additional hours for late Thursday or late Tuesday of the first week and usually but not always Friday as well of the first week. But it was always usual for the government of the day, when I was in opposition and Manager of Opposition Business, to ask for additional hours in the second week on the Tuesday, additional hours on the Thursday night and Friday and effectively what I would call a ‘job and finish’, a list of bills that were outstanding and needed to be progressed through the Senate prior to the Senate adjourning for the winter break. The opposition would scrutinise those bills, ensure that they were necessary for the end of the session and consent to the additional hours to allow everyone to participate in the debates, to allow senators to argue their cases about the particular legislation. That is really a Senate agreement, because of course the minor parties and Independents would agree that we needed to finalise the legislative agenda.

What we have seen in the last year and perhaps a little bit longer is an opposition and minor parties and Independents not willing to agree to additional hours in the last two weeks to allow the legislative agenda of the government of the day to proceed. There are a range of reasons that have been put forward. They hang their hat specifically on one main issue: they complain that the government did not add enough weeks to the sitting period. They bring out statistics and a range of information to demonstrate that fact. If we put that to the side for a moment, even with additional weeks it is still not unusual for the government of the day to ask for additional hours to allow the legislative program to be finalised in the last fortnight. Why? Because even over the last 10 years there have been uneven numbers of weeks and they have been interrupted on occasion by elections, which also means fewer weeks than in other years. So the opposition and the minor parties—if I am wrong about the minor parties I am sure they will correct me—complain that there are not additional weeks and argue for additional weeks. The point I am making is that, to finalise the bills prior to the winter session, it is not unusual for us to agree on a rough list of those bills which the government claims and argues are urgent and it is usually settled, sometimes with a little less than we might sometimes claim.

Despite the opposition rejection of additional sittings, and I will come to that, it is useful to acknowledge that the Senate has traditionally, as I have said, sat extended hours and on Fridays. And the opposition is not prepared, as far as I can see, to allow for additional hours this week in similar circumstances. It is disappointing for a government that has an important legislative agenda to progress. The opposition is using government business time. It seems when you analyse the figures that they are using government business time for their own business—in other words, for those matters which concern them. They want to discuss bills that go nowhere. They want to take up government business time discussing issues that do not progress the government’s legislative agenda. It is government business time and should be utilised for that purpose.

No doubt the opposition will say that they are refusing additional hours on the basis that, as I have indicated, the government has not allowed sufficient Senate sitting days. I disagree with this. This government allocated sitting days on the expectation that the Senate would allocate the standard amount of time for government business, but this is not occurring either. In the autumn sittings we have had a record low proportion of Senate time on government business—just 38 per cent of Senate time was given to government business as against a standard of around 50 per cent. So, even with the available time, those opposite and those on the crossbenches are ensuring that the available government business time has been reduced from 50 to 38 per cent. So my complaint is not only founded on the available time for government business but that you are chewing that down to ensure that we do not even get the available time to progress government legislation.

The complaint about the additional week then falls on a hollow vessel when you look at that statistic, because even with an additional week or weeks, if you continue to depress the number of hours that we have available for government business, you still do not progress government business. You are still caught with not being able to progress the government’s legislative agenda. You will still get a request for additional hours to ensure that we have available time to debate government bills. I took the opportunity of providing a graph for the Senate. I know it is unparliamentary, but it does highlight the problem.

Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities, Carers and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It’s very Kevin-like.

Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I think Mr Hockey has also used charts, so I would be very careful about that. The blue on the chart shows government business time. What we have is significantly less government business time available. I table the chart and circulate it to other members so they can see the issues that I raise. I know the opposition will, of course, cobble together a range of figures to support their case, but it is usual practice to ensure that the government’s legislative agenda is finalised. They have been successful, in part, in delaying and blocking the legislative agenda of this government—notably the CPRS legislation. They have also blocked the preventative health agency and the transformation of the NBN. Both were not supported by those opposite. All of that takes up legislative time. Granted, you do not have to support it—

Mitch Fifield (Victoria, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities, Carers and the Voluntary Sector) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There should be extra time now because you’ve abandoned the ETS.

Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

So you are still supporting it? It is good to hear the opposition is still supporting it. It would come as a shock to us on this side if you were saying that you support it.

Honourable Senators:

Honourable senators interjecting—

Alan Ferguson (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Enough banter, thank you.

Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I simply ask for what is usual practice in this place to be continued with to ensure that the government’s legislative agenda gets dealt with in the remaining fortnight before the winter break. It is not an unreasonable request, and it is a request that this government, when in opposition, sat down and reasonably accepted from the government of the day to ensure that their legislative program was dealt with—not voted for or against but allowed to be dealt with so that votes could be taken and positions put. What the opposition are now doing is ensuring legislation remains on the Notice Paper and is not voted for or against. What they are doing is frustrating the Senate in the tactics that they are using to ensure bills are not debated, their positions remain unknown and the Senate does not have the opportunity to express views in relation to bills.

Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

How dare the government say that the Senate is not helping them get on with their business. How dare the government say that the Senate is the problem. Clearly the Rudd government is the problem. They cannot even manage to get the number of sitting days this year right. I have here a chart. It shows a 37 per cent drop in the number of sitting days compared to 1999 levels. No wonder the government cannot get their stuff through; they have not set the right number of sitting days and weeks for this year. They are running this place as if it is policy on the run. The fact remains that there has been a 37 per cent drop in the number of sitting days since 1999, so before Mr Albanese in the other place gets on his high horse to whinge about the Senate he needs to get his facts right about making sure that business is managed according to the number of days set.

I made this point last year when you set the number of sitting days. You knew you were going to be short. It is just wrong the way that you come in here at the last minute and try to manage this place on the run. There is no way we can allow you to continue to do this. It is wrong and we will not be supporting it. I seek leave to incorporate a chart in Hansard.

Leave granted.

The chart read as follows—

Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The coalition will be opposing the motion moved by Senator Ludwig. I will put some real facts on the table—in contrast to the assertions made by Senator Ludwig. Firstly, we have the lowest number of sitting weeks of any government since World War II, which is a disgrace in itself. The crossbenchers have criticised the government on each occasion that the parliamentary schedule for sitting days has been put forward. Hansard will bear out the fact that all of us have said we trust the government to run the Senate chamber in a proper and fit way with the right number of sitting days. They did not do that in 2008 for the 2009 sitting schedule when we requested it be done. They again did not do it in 2009 for this sitting schedule. We have criticised the low number of weeks. The government do not like the scrutiny of the chamber, so they thought that they would be able to sneak through the provision of extending hours when they got bogged down with legislation. We have said that we are not going to do that. We are not going to support that; otherwise, we would continually see a decline in sitting weeks and legislation by exhaustion, not legislation by thorough analysis.

Let me come to a thorough analysis. Mr Albanese was on Lateline last night, and he has criticised the Senate for scrutinising legislation too much. I would like Mr Albanese to go back to some sort of politics 101 and understand the value of the Senate in scrutinising legislation. That is our role; that is what we do. The House of Representatives does not have that role as much as we do. We scrutinise legislation and we do it for a great purpose. I also dispel the myth that Senator Ludwig and the government have created that it is the coalition that actually controls the Senate. That is not true. All we need to do is to analyse the numbers to realise that we do not have a majority; we do not even equal the votes. We have one less than a majority so, if we want to move anything, we require the support—as do the crossbenchers—of each other. The majority of the chamber, not just the coalition, has decided that we are not going to play the games that the government wish to play—that is, reducing the number of productive weeks in this place and reducing the scrutiny of the government by allowing, at some point in time, additional hours and, as I said, legislation by exhaustion.

I also go to Senator Ludwig’s comment that 38 per cent of the Senate’s time has been taken up with government business. That is correct. But what Senator Ludwig conveniently left out in that 38 per cent is that that is purely for legislation. The other matters that take up the Senate’s time, to which the government members contribute—and in fact on many occasions have contributed more than any other group in this chamber—are things like ministerial statements, which are purely for ministers; taking note of answers, where the Labor Party and the crossbenchers contribute to half that time; the general conduct of business on a Thursday afternoon for anywhere between two and three hours, where the opposition of the day actually has the opportunity to raise matters—it is our exclusive time; committee reports, where Labor primarily introduce the committee reports and there is a response—again, from Labor senators as well as senators from around the chamber; matters of public interest, where Labor senators get more of the share of the chamber than any other group; and government responses to documents and reports. Again, the Labor Party generally speak on those as well. Standing orders provide for the format of the running of the chamber. We do not dictate when government business will be dealt with. We just follow the provisions of the standing orders that have been in place for many, many years prior to this government being in office.

I suggest to the government that one of the reasons why they are not getting some of their business through—in particular, legislation—is that they have a range of speakers. I can point to many examples where, on several occasions, government speakers outnumbered the coalition and the crossbenchers, taking up their own legislation time. There have been many occasions on which matters have been taken up in the chamber concerning hours or other procedural matters where we have spoken for less time than the government speakers, and some of the issues have been on the amount of time that they appear not to have in the chamber.

I also indicate that, on the legislative front, the opposition has not yet been given proof—which we have asked for—of what the matter is that is urgent and needs to be considered, requiring additional powers of the Senate. Mr Albanese has indicated that we are frustrating his program. That is not correct. This week alone, we are about to pass 17 pieces of legislation. That is not counting the pieces of legislation that have already gone through this week. Tomorrow we will be passing 17 pieces of legislation in what is called non-controversial time. Not only will we be doing that tomorrow but, for the first time that I can ever recall, the Senate will be commencing government business tomorrow with non-controversial legislation. It will not be dealing with other legislation because there is nothing else that is urgent. We are commencing on the non-controversial legislation. Those 17 bills are deemed to be important enough to be the ones that we commence the process with, and we will complete those on the basis that we are cooperating with the government in relation to legislation—in particular some budget measures that the government wishes to process through this place before what may possibly be the last two sitting weeks of this parliament.

I also indicate that the government have deferred five pieces of legislation that were on the list for this week. There are also two additional pieces of legislation that the government might have in the non-controversial selection. We are still determining whether or not they are non-controversial. But it goes to the point: the heart of the matter is that there is no other legislation that is deemed urgent enough for us to sit longer hours or to sit beyond these two sitting weeks. Senator Ludwig has just had 10 minutes to clearly demonstrate that there is any urgent legislation other than what is in the non-controversial legislation tomorrow, which we have agreed to pass through the Senate by the end of this week, but he did not do that. I think Senator Ludwig is crying tears and he is probably just pursuing the facade that the lower house is trying to—

Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They could be crocodile tears.

Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Crocodile tears, yes; thank you for that interjection. Senator Ludwig is simply just adopting the rhetoric of the lower house that we have no other excuse for failed policy other than, ‘Let’s blame the Senate,’ because the Senate seems to have this dark art of dealing with legislation that gets convoluted at times and it is very easy, from the House of Representatives perspective, to spin, ‘It’s not our fault; it’s the Senate’s fault.’ We are not going to wear that anymore at all.

I conclude my remarks by placing clearly on the record once again how cooperative this opposition has been with this government. I do not know why because we always get criticised about cooperation. In 2008 we gave up an extra 83 hours and, to be precise, 54 minutes to government business from our time and in 2009 we gave up 108 hours and 45 minutes of our time. We voluntarily gave this time to the government of the day. Senator Ludwig is indicating that there are fewer sitting weeks, so he believes that we should be giving more time. We have given more time than any opposition in the history of this Commonwealth to a government of the day, and the government of the day has responded by having fewer sitting weeks. I do not understand why the government is not standing up and saying: ‘We should be so thankful to have an opposition that is so considerate of government business time that they’ve given up their own time when they could have been debating issues of their own desire.’

I indicate, through you, Madam Acting Deputy President, to the government, to Senator Ludwig and to the Prime Minister that we are not going to do this any longer. We have allowed you to abuse the process, to abuse our generosity and we cannot do this anymore. We have given the government the equivalent of 4.6 sitting weeks for business in those hours that I indicated. They have squandered their time. They have not run the program effectively.

Now they get to the dying stages of this parliament and indicate that they want more sitting hours simply as a show of brinkmanship or as a show to the public. ‘Gosh, we’ve failed on some of our legislative policies. Our legislative agenda is in disarray. Let’s blame the Senate; let’s blame the opposition in the Senate.’ We will not have it. The record is now corrected. This government will not get additional hours; this government need to legislate properly through additional sitting weeks and also to manage their legislation program and not constantly withdraw or change their agenda because they do not have support or because they do not know how to manage the place. They certainly cannot organise their legislative agenda.

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

Perhaps I should start by reminding this place that the Greens moved a motion some time ago to extend the sitting of the Senate by four weeks. The government did not support it but, strangely enough, the opposition also did not support it. So while they are talking about lack of time, quite rightly, and criticising the government’s management of the legislative agenda, we Greens did provide the opposition with an opportunity to support an extension of sitting hours so that we could deal appropriately with the legislation.

I find it amazing that criticisms are being made of the Senate blocking legislation when, firstly, the government had an opportunity to extend sitting weeks but, secondly, there has been no attempt to have a leaders and whips meeting this fortnight. We always have a leaders and whips meeting at the beginning of the sitting fortnight before we break for the long winter break and for the summer break because we all know that there is going to be an extensive program of bills.

It happened under the previous government; it has happened under this government. We get a backlog of bills and there is a push to get them through the Senate chamber before we rise. Why hasn’t there been a leaders and whips meeting where all the parties’ leaders and the whips, as the name of the meeting suggests, talk about the legislative agenda, what the government priorities are, how long we expect the debate to last and what bills the government wants to get through urgently et cetera? We have not had that meeting, so we come into this place, we are told the government has a whole list of priorities, yet there is no discussion, as we usually have at the beginning of such sittings, to work out how we could make this place work a little better.

Having said that, I actually question how any senator who comes to Canberra for these two sitting weeks and does not expect to be sitting Fridays looks at the Senate agenda. We always sit on Fridays in the last two sitting weeks before the winter break and before the summer break because we know that there are a stack of bills that we need to deal with. That happened under the previous government as well. I will get on to the government not managing their legislative agenda in a minute but we always do sit at least those two days and long hours and we definitely did it under the previous government.

So what is different this time? What is different is that we have an even bigger stack of bills than we usually have because we have had so few sitting weeks to enable us to discuss the bills. It is disingenuous, as Senator Parry has pointed out, to say there is only a certain percentage of Senate time that has been spent on government business—that is, on legislation. We do spend other time on government business, but this place also deals with a range of other issues that are important to this country and we have quite rightly been dealing with those issues as well.

The Greens, as I said, proposed that we should sit for more weeks. We came here expecting that we would be sitting Fridays. I do not pack my bags to come here all the way from Western Australia knowing we have a full week without thinking that we are going to be sitting on the Fridays of these two sitting weeks. However, the government should have timetabled more sitting weeks for the Senate. They knew very well what bills they had. If they did not, they should have and that implies mismanagement of the legislative agenda. They knew what bills were coming. They knew what we would be dealing with.

They want to treat this place as a sausage factory when they used to rail for hours against the now opposition when they were in government about treating this place as a sausage factory. Now they are doing the same thing. They are trying to treat this place like a sausage factory by banking up the bills. There is a list a mile long of bills and we are supposed to be just ticking them off and pushing them through. Do they think that with things like welfare quarantining we may just close our eyes and it will go through without our full attention? There are a range of bills on the legislative agenda this week that we demand that we have time to talk about. We are not going to just tick and flick.

We need an appropriate time in this place to deal properly with the legislative agenda. As I said, the Greens came to this place expecting that we would be sitting longer this week. We prefer to sit on Fridays but we have not seen a reflection of our goodwill from the government because the government did not even see fit to come and talk to us about extended hours. We kept expecting them to, but there was no phone call to say, ‘What do you think about sitting longer hours?’ We heard the opposition got a phone call. We heard Senator Fielding got a phone call. Senator Joyce did not get a phone call apparently—maybe it is this end of the chamber.

Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Have you got the Greens number?

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

Apparently not, Senator McGauran. It goes back to management of this place.

Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Ludwig interjecting—

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

I did check with Emma and we did not.

Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Who’s Emma?

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

Our whip’s clerk. When I heard the rumour yesterday about extended hours, I checked whether we had had a phone call and we have not. Subsequently, apparently, we got a phone call. However, given that we came expecting that we would need to sit some extra hours—the preference is for sitting Friday so that we are not brain dead from sitting here into the late evenings, as has happened in the past—the Greens are willing to support this motion. We do, this time, concede that we do need to spend some extra hours on the legislative agenda, and we are willing in this instance to agree to sit this Friday. So we will be supporting the motion, because we are trying to show some goodwill to try to move the legislative agenda along, but it would be handy for us to be consulted through a leaders and whips process so that we can talk about the legislative agenda, set some priorities, do some estimates of how long it will take to discuss the legislation and have a more orderly approach. So, as I said, the Greens indicate that we will in this instance be supporting this particular motion.

Question put:

That the motion (Senator Ludwig’s) be agreed to.