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

Mr President, if you are going to allow government members to continue to flout the standing orders, that is for you. The fact is that there are extraordinarily important pieces of legislation before the Senate, and the Greens will accept our responsibility to be here and defend against the government the national interest on that legislation. It wants to change industrial relations legislation against the interests of working families of this country and change the environmental laws to allow loggers and miners greater rein over a whole range of issues, which we will be debating later this morning and which will extend into tomorrow—that is, of course, unless the government, including the President, uses its numbers to gag and guillotine that debate later in the day. That is something I would not put beyond this government at all. It is something I would not put beyond the President or any other member of the government. I have seen the precedent. I know how it works.

So we have the President deciding that he will go to this anniversary sitting in Tasmania while the Greens stay here to defend the public interest in this parliament. The government has brought on an extra sitting tomorrow because it simply does not want to have another week’s sitting later. We should be sitting the week after next to discuss the legislation being pushed through the parliament at this late stage of the year. We are at the end of a year in which the Senate has sat fewer times than in most other years in recent decades. It is a process of abuse of the Senate by the government because it has a majority. That is one of the things that the public can sort out this time next year. In the meantime, let me assure the voters of Tasmania that it is a difficult decision. Senator Milne and I regret being, in effect, put in the position of having to stay here in the Senate while the ceremony takes place in Tasmania. The President has made a different decision. That is up to him.