Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for the Arts) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak against the motion. If the government wants to postpone a bill on multinational tax avoidance it needs to explain to the House why. We have gone through a week, and most of last week, where the only thing we were dealing with was appropriations, where bills like this have been put off into the never-never again and again. We've had speech after speech on the only bill where no-one has to talk about the legislation and the only question before the House was whether or not money that everyone agrees should be paid would be paid. That's all the appropriations debate was. That's all this parliament has done. All that time, we've been waiting for the next bill in order after the education bill, which is the Treasury laws amendment bill that deals with multinational tax avoidance. After these weeks of waiting to get to the moment when the House would deal with multinational tax avoidance, without giving a single reason, without giving one single reason, the minister stands up and says, 'Let's just move on to something else.'

The parliament is in fact meant to follow an agenda. The government is in fact meant to have program. I've got to say I have never seen a program as light as the one this parliament has these days. We've had time after time where the speeches that we got were only on the Governor-General address-in-reply and on appropriations bills. If it continues this way, there will be members of parliament elected at the last election who will never have given a substantive speech on legislation.

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