Chris Evans (WA, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the minister for her response. I do not want to be churlish, but looking at it and getting back to me does not quite provide the level of satisfaction that I would like. I know that may not concern the minister, but I really would like to get a sense of what we are going to do about it. The problem has been around for a while. It has been raised with the government. The government is aware of it. Its own officers are aware of it. If there are inadequacies in my amendment, I am happy to accept that. It is not quite clear to me what they are, and I am always a bit wary of being told that when there is not a satisfactory explanation. But I am happy to concede that there may be inadequacies—I do not want to argue about that. If we can do it better, we should do it better.

But the question is: why don’t we fix it now? Why don’t we provide relief for those people now? Why don’t we delay the bill until tomorrow so that you can bring in the amendment and we can fix it? It seems to me that, if you can see there is a problem, this is an opportunity for us to fix it. As I understand it, we have the time to fix it, so let us fix it. I think that in this situation people do not want to be told that the government concede there is a problem but that they will look into it and will apprise them of their view later on. This is an opportunity inside the relevant piece of legislation to fix it. I was not aware of the Cyclone Larry issues, but that obviously makes a lot of sense. As I said, officers of the department told constituents of mine that they were sympathetic to their plight and that they would like to get the situation fixed but they cannot, so I would like some reassurance about when we are going to fix it. I would also like to know why we cannot just fix the problem now.