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

Senator Conroy interjects about us being a disgrace. I was going to let him off the hook; I was not going to embarrass him; but now that he has injected I will say that we just had a quorum called because the government could only muster one senator to attend the chamber. We had four or five on our side and you had one on your side after a dinner suspension. That is pretty ordinary, I think. I was baited by the minister and I mention that now. The minister needs to get his program a bit more organised. It is typical of the government’s program—and this is where we have been heading for some time.

Minister Roxon has blamed the opposition in the Senate for the delay in this legislation proceeding. That is an absolute load of rubbish. Let me give you the chronology since this legislation started. The one accurate thing that the minister said in her statement was that the bill passed through the House of Representatives on 8 September last year. The minister was correct—that is absolutely spot-on: the legislation did pass through the House of Representatives on 8 September last year, and here we are considering it today.

We are considering it today for a variety of reasons. Everyone understands—even speakers on the government side have said for some time—that the government determines the order in which bills are presented to the Senate. Everyone knows that, if you want a bill to be presented to this Senate and debated in the chamber, you list it at a position where it can be considered. There must be some reason the Senate has not yet considered these bills. The Leader of the Government in the Senate, the minister or, indeed, any of the ministers on that side could have delayed the introduction of this bill. If you introduce a bill on a Monday or a Tuesday and it is high up in the order of business, that is fine—it will be debated. When you introduce a bill on a Wednesday you have very little time—