Richard Di Natale (Victoria, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak against the Budget Savings (Omnibus) Bill 2016. Let me begin, for the benefit of those people who may be listening to this debate, with a little bit about the history of this bill. People will be listening in, hear about a bill called an omnibus bill and think: 'What the hell is that about? What is an omnibus bill?' The use of omnibus bills is a political tactic. You lump together a group of legislative changes—often petty or nasty, sometimes hugely regressive measures. You put them together—in this case, 24 separate pieces of legislation—you wrap them up into one bill and you do it in a way that allows you to introduce that legislation to the parliament such that, rather than each of those individual measures getting the scrutiny they deserve, what often happens is that one or two pieces of that legislation might get a little bit of attention. It is basically a tactic to ensure that a number of substantial changes can be lumped together without the scrutiny of the parliament.

The normal process would be that a piece of legislation would be sent to an inquiry. In this case, this bill would go to the Economics Legislation Committee to try and at least provide some level of scrutiny to some of the 24 pieces of legislation that make up this bill. You would expect that, for a bill with over $6 billion in savings that affects areas from clean technology investment to the level of debt that students face to R&D incentives to punishing people with mental illness right through to an attack of some of the most vulnerable people in our community, at the bare minimum this Senate would need to do its job and spend some time in the Senate committee process asking questions of those people who might be affected by these changes, listening to the experts, getting some in-depth analysis and trying to get a clearer understanding of what these changes mean for people. While often that process may not result in us being able to substantively overturn legislation, sometimes we can get a few small wins and improve a bad bit of legislation somewhat by making minor amendments through the committee process.

That is what normally happens. Normally you would have a single piece of legislation getting a thorough inquiry and some scrutiny through that inquiry process. In this case we have got 24 separate pieces of legislation across a whole range of areas. They have been denied the appropriate scrutiny through the inquiry process. And how so? The Liberal Party with the support of the Labor Party denied us the opportunity to have public hearings into this bill. Just think about that. There are 24 separate pieces of legislation, returning savings of over $6 billion, and the parliament has been denied the opportunity to ask questions about what those changes mean for people.

You would think that was bad enough, but it gets worse. Under the cover of darkness, again the Labor Party and Liberal Party joined together to decide to overturn some of the pieces of legislation in this bill and replace them with an alternative set of savings that we really do not understand yet, because they, like the 24 pieces of legislation in the original bill, were denied the scrutiny that they deserve through an inquiry process. So we now have a bill which has been substantially changed that we found out about two days ago that is going to be rammed through the parliament tonight. And how does that happen? How is it that a handshake deal—a dirty deal between the Labor Party and the Liberal Party—to cut funding for Australian renewable energy investment, to cut funding for family support, to impose more debt on students and to slash R&D incentives can be agreed on between the Labor Party and the Liberal Party two days ago and now be about to be rammed through the parliament? That happened because of another dirty deal: