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

The coalition planned for a lot more sitting weeks, if I could take the interjection from Senator Brown. We need to have more sitting weeks in a year; there is no argument about that. There is an overriding premise, though, that the government of the day sets the agenda. The government of the day will set the sitting agenda for each year. It is something that we have always agreed with and supported. However, I give notice to the government for the future. Hopefully we will be back on the treasury bench for the next sitting calendar scheduling but, if we are not and if the government does not set it correctly, we will then support the minor parties—if they are still here as well—in setting a better sitting time frame for each year.

I have been on the record on three separate occasions this year indicating that the sitting schedule has not been long enough. You cannot just come to the last two or three weeks of a sitting schedule and say we need to increase the hours now. This should have been done when we needed to set the calendar at the beginning of the year. We are going to ensure that the government has the running of the program, but again the warning to the government is there: if it does not set adequate hours, we will move away from that long-held tradition of letting government set the sitting pattern and start to run interference in that program to make sure that we have adequate sitting times.

I indicate that the opposition has been reluctantly supportive of occasional extended hours when the government have come to us to ask for them. But, going back to the middle of the year, I indicated that this would not go on forever. We are not going to constantly prop up a government that does not set enough hours in its program. We even had the ludicrous situation earlier in the year where the government deliberately filibustered debate in a very light sitting year in order to negotiate with minor parties. We wasted days upon days with negotiation when that could have been usefully utilised for legislation. We will not be supporting the Greens with their amendment, purely on the basis that the government of the day should be enabled and should be given the right to set a sitting schedule, but again the warning is there: set it better or we will start to interfere.