Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Following on in part from the answer just given, whatever may be said about the first set of amendments—given that they arose, we are asked to understand, out of the PJCIS and that that had been ventilated for some time—the same cannot be said about this second set of amendments. It may be that, if we have the opportunity to understand these amendments, they are worthy of support because they make a bad bill slightly less awful than it currently is. But, given that we have just been given 15 or 16 pages worth of amendments that we are told are designed to offer some protection to journalists, I ask the minister again: in respect of these, given that this was not an agreed outcome of PJCIS and was not, as the minister has urged us to accept with respect to the first set of amendments, something that has been out there in the public domain for a long period of time, surely we should have the opportunity now to go and test these amendments with journalists, with people who represent journalists and with free speech advocates before all of us sitting in this parliament are asked to vote on them. That surely should be an uncontroversial proposition: that we now have time to go and consider these amendments which have just come out of the blue today. I ask the minister to please adjourn this debate so that we can go and seek advice about whether these amendments give journalists the kind of satisfaction that they are seeking.

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