Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

When will the Greens and the Independents realise that they are yet again being dudded by this government and by the incompetence of the minister in charge of communications? Can I take the Senate back to the last sitting days of last year. After doing nothing for most of the year because of the very light legislative program, suddenly in the last three or four days of the sitting, when everyone was looking forward to getting home for Christmas—plans had been made—we had this parliament sitting day and night to deal with that package of NBN legislation, not the one before us now but a different set of very important bills that were being amended as we were speaking in the chamber.

Yet here we are in exactly the same position now. We came into this chamber on Monday to debate the bill and to deal with it through the committee stage. We were here ready to go and then Senator Ludlam got up in his speech on the second reading and let the cat out of the bag that the bill we were then all debating, the one we had in front of us, the written legislation we had on our desks as we debated, was not going to be the bill that we were dealing with, that there were going to be pages and pages and volumes and volumes of amendments. So what we were debating on Monday was just not the bill that the government was eventually going to ask us to debate. And here we are on the last day of sitting before a five-week break—