Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Immigration) Share this | Hansard source

He only accepted them yesterday. That is why you know there was a problem with the bill: because the Australian Labor Party could not let the bill go through the other place in its existing form. They also could not tell us that they were going to accept the amendments a few days ago because that would have looked bad. But, at the very last minute, they clearly realised that this was a piece of unworkable legislation and, as such, what was a very, very bad bill was made slightly better. But that was not as a result of anything Minister Shorten, the Australian Labor Party or the Greens did; t was only through the due diligence of those of us on this side of the chamber.

As I commenced my remarks I said the guillotine will fall at 8 pm tonight. On that basis, whilst I have a lot more that I could say about this legislation and the fact that if it had not been amended by the coalition there would have been some extremely detrimental consequences for the people of Australia, I will end my remarks here so that another colleague of mine has a brief time to put some comments on the record.