Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

It is not a negotiation; it is an evidence based way of gaining what the baseline would be. So you do not sit in a room, as with industrial relations, and bargain about what the baseline should or should not be. It is about an evidence based outcome. Why? Because internationally we want to maintain the integrity of the system. To do that there has to be an independent assessment. It has to be evidence based and the methodology has to be followed. That is why we do not support a separate individual amendment dealing with one industry which then bypasses that. You would want them to go through and develop the methodologies—evidence based metho­dologies—and have the independent assess­ment to ensure the integrity of the system so that where it lands it is supported by the evidence.

Ultimately it is a legislative instrument and if people disagree with it, it will come back here as a legislative instrument. We all know that, if the legislative instruments get it right, they generally go through this place. If they do not then there is an opportunity for those people to disallow the instruments in the Senate if they do not think they got it right. That does mean, however, that if it is disallowed it will have to go back through the process again. But that is what people can decide to choose in the Senate—it is always an option available to us. So it is much better to deal with it in that way than to simply mandate through what is ultimately an amendment to the bill, which would then be an amendment to the act, which is specific and about only one industry. It then goes around the actual integrity of the system. So what you are doing in one fell swoop is making sure that the bill itself, if it were to be passed with this amendment, would already have a hole in it; it would have a landfill—it would make sure that it would be criticised for not being able to stand up to scrutiny and not having an independent process to assess each of the methodologies. So to deal with Senator Xenophon's issue around negotiation, it is consultation, sure; but it is evidence based to arrive at appro­priate, researched figures which are backed up by the evidence. So it is not a bargain.

Lastly, to deal with the issue of ensuring that everybody got it right—it is a legislative instrument; people can decide in here that they did not get it right and make their own judgments about that. But first and foremost it is, with the best of government intention, designed to solve this in a very short space in time—because we do recognise there is an issue that needs to be resolved, but the way to resolve it is to use the framework.