Andrew Bartlett (Queensland, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

At the end of the motion, add “but, in respect of the Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006, the Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Committee report by the first sitting day in 2007”.

The report seeks to refer three bills to committee. The Democrats and I do not have any problem with the first two, but I do have a concern about the third. The proposal is to refer the Environment and Heritage Legislation Amendment Bill (No. 1) 2006 to the relevant Senate committee for inquiry and report by 17 November this year, and it has an appendix giving a statement of the reported reasons for referral. My amendment seeks to extend the reporting date to the first sitting day of 2007. For the record, I need to highlight a wider concern that I have—and this is not particularly aimed at the committee or the Government Whip; it is about a change that is occurring because of the attitude of the cabinet or a range of government ministers—that is, the very recent trend of the government to refer legislation for very short periods of time and to put in referrals before the legislation has even appeared.

Unless it has been tabled in the House of Representatives in the last few minutes—and I do not think it has—this particular legislation has not yet appeared. It is not completely unprecedented nor overly common, but it is becoming common for the government, presumably at the behest of ministers, to put in referrals to legislation that has not even appeared. In this case, and in many other cases, the Senate as a whole does not have much of an idea of what the legislation contains.

As a result of a range of phone calls in the last 24 hours I have managed to garner a very broad and vague understanding of what is in this particular legislation. I understand that it contains around 130 amendments to the Environment Protection and Biodiversity Conservation Act. As to the significance of those amendments, of course we are not in a position to judge, because we have not seen them—trying to ascertain the nature of them has been beyond me to this stage.

To have the Senate agreeing to what in any case would be a very short reporting date for legislation that we have not seen, that we do not know the detail of, I think is very poor practice. It is not the first time this has happened, of course, in the last 12 months. On this occasion the Democrats believe it is important enough to put on the record our concerns. What we are seeing is a growing number of occasions where the government is referring legislation instantly rather than allowing the legislation to sit—in many cases, in the House of Representatives—at least for a few days to allow people to look at it before they decide whether or not it needs referring, and giving it an extremely short reporting date.

This reporting date, 17 November, is not even a sitting day; it is the end of the first non-sitting week after the next sitting fortnight. There is another full non-sitting week after this that the committee could use, which will be denied to it, as well as of course the final two sitting weeks of the year. I would think that normally in such a circumstance there would be some justification given as to why it is sufficiently urgent that what sounds like very significant amending legislation needs to be passed through the whole parliament before the end of the year. We have not had that. Frankly, there is no reason, even if it does need to be passed by the end of the year, why it could not be the first sitting day back, which would be 27 November. By putting it at 17 November, the first non-sitting week, the committee will not be in a position to do anything other than perhaps have one or two very truncated hearing days. There will be very little opportunity for the community, for environment groups and for many of the other people in the wider community affected by this to have any input into the matter. I think that is an extremely poor process, one that is becoming very common. It is very much a departure from the way the normal Selection of Bills Committee process has operated for as long as I have been following it—which, I have to say, is now not only the nine years I have been in this place but about seven years prior to that. (Time expired)