Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

I would love to proceed without interruption, Mr Speaker. This is obviously a very serious matter—the intrusion of the parliament and the shutting down of question time, which, of course, is a courtesy extended to the opposition and to the crossbenchers by the government.

Mr Speaker, as the Speaker and as the person responsible for the House and the chamber, I would request that you conduct a thorough investigation because, obviously, if people are signed in from the public to the building and, in many cases, to the chamber, they are signed in by a member of parliament, in which case there may well be a trail of where the miscreants who disrupted the parliament came from. I think it would be important to determine that, and the government would also like to know what action might well be taken in the future about this matter. On behalf of the government, I would like to apologise to the rest of the members of the public who came to Canberra today to watch the parliament and had their question time disrupted. To the school students who are in Canberra to learn about their democracy, that is not the way democracy should behave. I ask you to conduct that investigation, Mr Speaker.

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