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

I won't detain the House long; I know there's important business about to occur. I simply want to thank the Privileges Committee for dealing with this. It shows, as most members are aware, that the Privileges Committee has continued to act in a nonpartisan way and to make sure that it is defending the effective functions of this House.

This resolution is really important for this reason: if we're to have free debate in this House, it is essential that people be protected in their communications with us. Anything less than that means we no longer have free debate in this House.

For a long time it's been the case that, if issues arose during a period of sittings, Speakers would prefer there to be direct authority from the House before they took action with the courts. This resolution provides exactly that authority for the Speaker to be able to make representations on behalf of the House to the courts on the exact issue that the member for Clark just spoke about. There are times when the House is not sitting, either because we're in a long recess or we're in a caretaker period, when, with this resolution, the Speaker should be in no doubt that there is a clear request from the House that we want privilege protected when parliamentary privilege is asserted, we want to make sure that it's followed through on and we want to make sure that it is well understood that it's the view of the House that free debate is only protected if people feel confident about being able to come to members of parliament and provide information that might otherwise be confidential.

Question agreed to.

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