Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the House) Share this | Hansard source

on indulgence—Members from around the House have been asking about arrangements for today and the possibility of us still being here tomorrow morning. I will just give an indication of how today will run. The Senate at the moment is determining their order of business and their pace of business. Effectively, the critical issue for us is that any bills the Senate seeks to amend will then have to come back to the House, and there's a transmission period between the two that can easily take two hours. Looking at where we think the Senate is up to, what will certainly happen in any event later today is that I'll come back to the House to suspend two standing orders: one for the automatic adjournment and one that prevents us from receiving continued messages from the Senate. We should all work on the basis that, I suspect, we will be in a position where anything that the Senate is seeking to amend will get back here at a reasonable time so that we would, in fact, stay later today. If it gets to the point—and I don't think it will—where the Senate is sending messages back to the House, or sending them after 8 pm and we are uncertain as to when we'd actually get the messages, then we'd make the decision to come back early tomorrow. But I don't think we'll be in that situation. Needless to say, if you're planning to get on a flight shortly after five o'clock, you might want to review those arrangements. Other than that, I expect that we're in a situation where we'll be able to resolve any of the matters that we need to resolve just by sitting a little bit longer than we ordinarily would today. In saying that, I declare that, if we end up still here tomorrow and still here over the whole weekend, I'll be the one person in the House very happy about the outcome.

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