Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Deputy Speaker. So here was the precedent. What were the concerns of the opposition that led to a 15-hour sitting of the parliament on its first day? The principal concern was that there was no question time on sitting Fridays. I do not think the founding fathers would have envisaged that we would have had a proposed parliamentary sitting day devoted exclusively to private members—that is, no government business whatsoever. I do not think the founding fathers, with great respect to them, would have envisaged the dominance of the executive over the parliament itself. Certainly there is not a provision in the Constitution for private members’ sitting days, although they are constitutional—and I will get onto that.

What sitting Fridays represented was a degree of generosity and reform by the Rudd government, in trying to balance up the power of the executive over private members. Who would have benefited? We would have had under those proposals committee reports being tabled in the House when it started on Friday, and then at 10 o’clock every committee member who served on the committee—in addition to any other member, for that matter—having the opportunity to give their version of that committee report. I do not apologise to this place for being one who champions the role of parliamentary committees. I value the contribution of all those who serve on parliamentary committees. It is a frustration of this place that those who do serve on parliamentary committees do not in a timely way get the opportunity to record their considerations of the issues confronting their particular parliamentary committee and why they may have recommended or not supported different proposals that went to make up the parliamentary report.

So the big winners would have been those backbenchers who had served on parliamentary committees. They would have had the opportunity to present a report when there was no competing government business. Committee members and other members would have been able to go straight into the Main Committee and give their contribution the very morning that the report was tabled in parliament. The other big winner, apart from private members having more opportunities to have private members’ motions debated in the House, was the opposition shadow ministry, because they could have developed private members’ motions—may I say, perhaps designed to embarrass the government over one issue or another. They could have had their remarks recorded in the Hansard, again without any competing government business. I thought there were considerable advantages in these proposals. It is also true that, if they were not participating on private members’ Fridays, members could have devoted themselves to other aspects of their parliamentary life here or, indeed, returned to their electorates.

But what were the arguments used in that record 15-hour debate? The first proposition was that the standing orders were designed to have no starting quorum. A starting quorum is a constitutional requirement for every parliamentary sitting day and you cannot actually start a parliamentary sitting day without a starting quorum. In other words, if this morning there had only been 28 or 29 members in the House, the Speaker would have been forced to adjourn the parliament. Every parliamentary sitting day requires that starting quorum and nothing in the proposals that the Leader of the House put could have given the slightest suggestion that we were trying to obviate a starting quorum.

The other proposition was in relation to deferring quorums and divisions to the next sitting day. There was an interesting argument consistently presented by the opposition that somehow this was breaching the Constitution. The Manager of Opposition Business said that the dinner breaks on Mondays and Tuesdays, the other precedent for that, were consensual—that is, there was agreement that there be no divisions and no quorums. I have to say that, if something is ultra vires the Constitution, it is ultra vires whether it is consensual or not. But the Manager of Opposition Business was mistaken. That is to say that standing order 55(b) and standing order 133 permit the deferring of quorums and divisions. So there is nothing consensual about it. Any member of the House on the opposition side or the government side can within the standing orders rise during the dinner break and call for a quorum. Divisions are automatically postponed, but they certainly can call for a quorum and that quorum must be counted, but it is deferred. So there was ample precedent.

It is true that the Leader of the House referred to the government obtaining a legal opinion, and much was made of the fact that the legal opinion was not tabled. I think the opposition would have had more credibility had they had a consistent track record of tabling legal advice. Of course, that was not the case. And I will defend the clerks of the House, if I may. I do not believe that the Clerk or indeed the Deputy Clerk would, without the greatest protest and argument with the Speaker, agree to any proposition that they felt breached the Constitution.

I thought it was rather sad to see the former leading law officer of the land, Mr Ruddock, the former Attorney-General, suggest that privilege was somehow at risk because of the issue of deferring quorums. Can I point out that, if the former Attorney-General were correct and even if you accept that the deferring of quorums and divisions in the dinner breaks on Mondays and Tuesdays was consensual—which is false—the alleged consensual nature of that deferment would not protect privilege.

Indeed, a member of the opposition did ask the Speaker about the possible loss of privilege because of the deferring of quorums and divisions on a sitting Friday. I will quote from page 829 of Hansard. The Speaker said:

The Clerk is not aware of any case concerning parliamentary privilege in respect of either house which has been decided on the basis of whether a quorum had been present when words were spoken or actions taken.

Standing order 54 requires that the Speaker cannot read prayers—

so we are talking about the commencing quorum—

to commence a meeting of the House unless a quorum is present. This provision will apply on scheduled sittings on Fridays.

So here you have the former first law officer of the land raising an argument about privilege which is unsupported by the Speaker on the advice of the Clerk.

The other point I should make is this: during the Howard government we had sittings of the Senate where there has been no question time. If question time is a requirement of accountability, why was it that the Howard government was happily sitting the Senate on Fridays? Mr Deputy Speaker Schultz, you know that in past practice the House has sat on Fridays without a question time and without an MPI. And what was the device that was chosen by the former government? We have not yet used it, and I hope that we will not—that is, that we sat through a Thursday and into a Friday at the end of session but called the extended session a Thursday sitting only. We have even broken on a Thursday and reconvened on a Friday but still called it a Thursday sitting. If the passion for a question time and an MPI on Friday was so great, why did the members of the former government, the ministers of the former government and, indeed, the leaders of the House in the former government, not have a question time and an MPI on those Fridays?

In conclusion, can I make a couple of points. The Rudd Labor government proposed not to decrease any question times. We still proposed to have four question times, exactly the number each week that the Howard government had. It was the same with MPIs—three MPIs a week, just as the Howard government had. But in that victory of killing off sitting Fridays—and I might observe that in the six months it has been the only thing that has unified the opposition—what have they now achieved? They do not get a private members’ day free of government time; they do not allow backbenchers to comment on parliamentary reports in a timely way. In fact, it is all being done in the evening. I referred to the leader of the Nationals, and I think he will be rising at 8.30 in the evening. I am sure that, notwithstanding his illustrious office, sadly, there will be very few media persons around to listen to proceedings. So we have killed off the opportunity of more backbenchers participating in private members’ time and we have really killed off the effectiveness of the opposition shadow parliamentary secretaries and shadow ministers to use private members’ time, as they legitimately can, to make points against the government.

This has been a great victory that the opposition has had, unifying them at least on one single issue in six months and devoiding themselves long term of opportunities to make points as they should as an alternative government. Instead they must do it in the evening when everyone has gone home and no-one is interested. Personally, that is the decision that you have to live with, but I am rather sad. I am sad for the parliament, I am sad for backbenchers and really it was a pathetic effort by the opposition.

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