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

The Democrats also support an amendment to ensure that the cut-off motion is not applied to the Wheat Marketing Amendment Bill 2007. We all know the politics behind the wheat-marketing issue and the legislation and differing views there. As Senator O’Brien said, it is not just a matter of a split within the government; there is a split within the grower community. That is fine; people are entitled to have differing views. But that in itself I think highlights how completely inappropriate it is to railroad through some very significant changes without any examination at all. This is not just a matter of extending the veto further—that is not something that the Democrats have a problem with as an interim measure. But we all know that that could have been done ages ago. What we simply have here is the fact that it took the government until right now to get their act together to figure out what they were going to do. They could not get it together until right now and they are saying to us, ‘Well, we’ve left it till one minute to midnight to introduce legislation. It has got to be passed by midnight. So put it through.’ That would be acceptable if it just dealt with the veto, but, as Senator O’Brien and others have said, it does not. That is not just contemptible of the Senate; it is, even more concerning, contemptible of the growers, who are obviously directly affected by this and seriously concerned.

It is important to emphasise what the Senate is actually debating here. We are not debating the pros and cons of changes to the wheat-marketing arrangements; we are talking about the process by which the Senate deliberates on changes to that process and changes to those laws. We are not just forcing a vote on determining a political position. It is not just some motion expressing an opinion; we are talking about changing the law here that directly affects wheat growers throughout Australia.

The Senate and the public should be reminded of the whole purpose of the cut-off motion—standing order 111. The original genesis goes back to my Queensland Democrat predecessor, Michael Macklin, in the 1980s. It was not a specific attempt to constrain this government; it was brought in and supported by the then opposition coalition parties as an initiative of the Democrats to try to prevent precisely this sort of thing where governments, because they have control over the order of business in the Senate, would introduce legislation and then immediately try and bring on debate and force the Senate to deal with it straight away or force the Senate to go through the problematic process of actually forcibly adjourning it. So standing order 111 was put in place. It is an automatic procedure to ensure that legislation only just introduced cannot be brought on straight away for debate unless the Senate agrees. That was the whole purpose of it. It was specifically to prevent abuses like this where we have legislation being introduced one day and are immediately told, before anybody has even examined it, that we have got to agree to debate it straight away or within the next week.

That is clearly an abuse of Senate process. It is yet another example of this government’s misuse of its Senate majority and its willingness to pervert Senate process. As I said yesterday in relation to a different matter, the problem here is not just in relation to what it might mean for wheat growers if we pass legislation that is not properly scrutinised; it is what it means with the precedent it sets and the standards it sets in the way the Senate operates. We will have, apparently, a Senate committee inquiry of sorts tomorrow—or a hearing of some sort, perhaps—but any form of attempt to have even a half-rushed look at this legislation before debating it within the space of a week will simply bring the Senate committee process into disrepute. That is already a problem, as I flagged yesterday—people are becoming less and less interested in participating in Senate committee processes when they are so rushed that they believe they are a farce. So we are in this catch-22 situation where, even if we do try and look at it, we will be running the risk of discrediting the whole system by engaging in a process that cannot possibly do justice to the issue before us.

So this is a serious issue that goes beyond the merits of the various arguments about what happens with wheat marketing. It is about abuse of Senate process. This is precisely the thing I can recall warning about before the last election, clearly unsuccessfully—that there was a risk that the government could get control of the Senate and that, if they did, inevitably, as with any government, not just this one, they would abuse that power. Despite the Prime Minister’s promises after that eventuated, after the election, that he would not abuse that power, there is now a long list of abuses of that power. This is just another one. And it is quite a serious one, I might say.

Let me repeat, before I conclude, what is actually being put forward here by the government. It is that a piece of legislation that makes significant changes to wheat-marketing arrangements, far beyond just extending a bit further the existing veto power, is to be required to be debated within a week of the legislation appearing, within a week of anybody having a chance to look at it—not just us, the legislators, but, more importantly in many respects, the people who are directly affected. That is contemptuous of all wheat growers, whatever their perspective on what should happen with the single desk and everything else. It is a serious problem. It is a serious contempt of the Senate. It is a degrading of the parliamentary process. It is something that people really need to pay attention to because it is and should be a clear part of the issue at the upcoming election. We can all campaign on what we think should happen with the single desk. We can all campaign on workplace relations. We can all campaign on tax. We can all campaign on all those things. But the key issue beyond just who ends up getting in government is how the parliament is going to operate after the next election in scrutinising whoever gets into government. If we have a Senate that is perverted and degraded to the level that it has been dragged down to in the last couple of years—if that continues and becomes the norm for another three years after the next federal election—then I fear the public’s already very low esteem for politics and the parliament will be plunged down to perhaps irretrievable levels.

Going back to the particular motion before us, the Democrats do not believe the Wheat Marketing Amendment Bill should be exempted from the cut-off order, for the reasons I have stated. Any sort of spin that says the Senate is trying to hand powers back to AWB is simply misleading all speakers. I will add the Democrats’ commitment to this as well. We have indicated that we are quite prepared to support a very simple piece of legislation that extends the veto for a short period of time and does nothing else. But it is crucial that these other mechanisms that are in here are properly scrutinised. Let me repeat the point that we are looking at changing laws. And we all know that, once laws are changed, it is often quite difficult to then un-change them. Certain procedures get put in place, people adapt to what is put in place, for better or worse, and then you have to look at how you fix up any problems, even unintended consequences and problems that have not been thought through because it was rushed. We have all seen that time and time again. We have been dealing with legislation just this week. It is not politically contentious but we were just fixing stuff-ups because we rushed it through too quickly the time before. This is not just about politics and party positioning and that sort of thing. It is about doing our job properly, which is something I think we need to remind ourselves of occasionally—actually ensuring that the laws we pass do what we think they are going to do. The people who are most likely to know what the real effects are going to be are the people who work in this area, who live with it day in, day out, which is virtually none of us—I know there are a few wheat growers in the Senate, but virtually none of us. They have a better idea than anybody of what the effects of changes like this—