Claire Moore (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Hansard source

We are now seeing the government operating in a calm, reasonable, adult way! We had the dress rehearsal for this motion yesterday. I should not have been surprised when it seemed to move through with just a vote by the parliament to give this chamber a chance to consider the motion, followed by an opportunity for an exchange of one-minute statements. I was surprised, and thought that the government had given the chamber the chance to decide which way we would go on this motion. But, no, that happened yesterday. We come back in today and the exact same motion is put up before us this afternoon; the same intent of the motion came through this afternoon. My response is the same.

As we said on this side, the sitting pattern is determined by the government. When we agreed to that sitting pattern, we said that we would not be agreeing to requests for extensions of hours except in exceptional circumstances. Since we had that discussion, there has been no approach by the government putting their reasons to us about what they need to look at, explaining why things are so urgent or saying what they want to have done. That has not occurred. In fact, the attempts to talk about the schedule have been made by me when I have gone to see the Manager of Government Business in the Senate to look at what is happening. But, no, we have not had any discussions about the process they want to follow.

Senator Brandis talking about the lack of sitting days in this sitting pattern is surprising at best. We heard from senators earlier that we had the election a mere 14 weeks ago. The election happened; the result was known. People wanted to know when were we going to sit, when were we going to come back to Canberra to begin this session. We did not hear from the government; a discussion did not occur. In fact, the only time allowed for the Senate in this sitting pattern was three weeks, and one week of estimates. The government decided that sitting pattern. We have worked with that sitting pattern. We had a whole week of sitting last week and again, in a calm and reasonable and adult way, the government did not put before us the urgency they had.

As I said yesterday, the Senate considers each piece of legislation that comes before it. We look at the legislation. Every senator in this place has the right to consider the legislation and take part in the debate. So many times in the last parliament we sat and listened to every single member of the then opposition make the same speech over and over again—in fact, all of us on this side knew the content of that speech and we could have said it over and over again—but every senator had the chance to take part in the debate.

The sitting pattern is determined by the government. The government has the right to organise the business of the sitting pattern. We have gone through the debate as presented to us. We had the offer yesterday for a change of hours. That was voted on by this chamber, and it was defeated. Today we have the same proposal to sit beyond eight o'clock to fulfil all of the bills listed by the government. This had not been taken to us before it was moved. We do not think that is adult, we do not believe it is reasonable and we certainly do not believe it is calm management of this chamber.