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

Mr Speaker, I have a point of order that then becomes a question to you. Obviously, this is an unusual sitting and I wish to raise an issue that I have privately raised with you and, in turn, raised with the Leader of the House, and the Leader of the House is of the same mind on the points I'm about to raise . We have an objective as a parliament to be showing the public that the rules that apply to them also apply to us. That means we have an objective to make sure we avoid common touch points and things like that. We are about to have a number of votes on a second-reading amendment. In the ordinary course we could go back to what we did 10 years ago, because the objective is to be able to conduct the vote without people having to swap from one side to the other. Given that I moved one of these amendments, that could mean I have a chance of getting it over the line. But if we work on the basis that the government will oppose all three of the second-reading amendments, which is a reasonable bet—it was only once we got them to support one—what I suggest is that, for the second-reading amendment that was moved by the member for Rankin, we do what we used to do 10 years ago, which is, instead of asking whether or not the amendment be agreed with, we use the old formulation: 'that the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question'. That means the government would vote on that side and we would vote on this side in support of the second reading amendment, and the crossbench has allocated seats, whichever way they want to go.

The problem this time—and I'm to blame for this—is that we have two amendments, one of them moved by me, that are amendments to the amendment and so the old formulation won't work for them.

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