Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

The Greens oppose this motion. It is an absolute affront to the voting public in this country that the government is truncating the sittings of the Senate. What we are seeing is a three-way squeeze: firstly, fewer sitting days; secondly, a lengthening of the sitting days that we have, to accommodate the usual list of necessary legislation; and, thirdly, an increasing use of the gag and the guillotine to make sure that, even with the lengthened days, the government’s legislation goes through.

On my calculations, this will be the year of fewest Senate sittings, if you set aside election years, since 1964. It is over 40 years since the Senate has sat so little in a non-election year, when of course there are fewer days of sitting because of elections. The government has taken us back to the middle of last century as far as the Senate sittings are concerned. The National Party have gone along with the dictates of the executive to have the Senate treated in this fashion, along with the voting public’s right to know that the Senate, with its charge to vet government legislation, is able to do that adequately, which is not so.

Whether or not voters again endorse the majority in this place is something that they will have to consider at next year’s election. If they do, the Senate will continue to be treated as a plaything of the executive—which essentially these days means the Prime Minister—and not as a second and equal chamber here to ensure that legislation and other matters going through this parliament are indeed in the informed service of the public and not just a rubber stamp of the dictate of the executive. We are in a democracy. If people vote for it then people will get it.

At the last election—it has to be said—people did not know that this would be the outcome, but at the next election they will. The difficulty of course is that, to get back the balance of power which makes the Senate function in the efficient and productive way it has in recent decades, will require the government to lose more than half the seats available in the Senate. So we will see. The Greens will be campaigning on a basis of ‘rescue the Senate’ at the next election.