Sam Dastyari (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am not an angry senator. I just want to make sure that Senator Simms has an opportunity. By the way, I think Senator Simms has made an incredible contribution in the period that he has been in the Senate. I have chosen to 'like' him on Facebook. I have 'liked' his speeches. I thought the speech he made about the Safe Schools Coalition was outstanding and I believe I may even have shared it with the people who follow me. It would be a real loss and a shame, Senator Simms, if at the end of a double-dissolution election either yourself or Senator Hanson-Young were no longer part of this chamber. I hope that is not the case. I do not think you are the best senator from South Australia, I think we have some fantastic senators from South Australia, but I think you make a worthwhile contribution and you are a good person to boot.

Process matters. Transparency matters. Having a public debate matters. Having an opportunity to explore ideas about how we best run this Senate and how best people are elected to this Senate is a worthwhile process. I worry that we have a process which has largely been dominated by House MPs who frankly have no appreciation of the culture of this place and have no appreciation of how the Senate works. I believe that a Senate process where the Senate conducted an investigation for itself would have been a better process. That was not the will of the Senate and, of course, I am going to accept the will of the Senate. I believe we need a longer process to allow some of these issues to be explored and a process that is longer than a four-hour hearing on a Tuesday morning on another sitting day. I believe there are better processes and better ways of doing this. Let us not pussyfoot around this, let us not kid ourselves, there is a government at the moment who has a social agenda as abhorrent to people like myself, and to many of the Greens as well, I might add, as the Abbott government

Yes, they have a more softly spoken Prime Minister. Yes, they have improved their rhetoric on a whole range of issues. But, fundamentally, the policy agenda being driven by the Turnbull government is no different than that that was being driven by the Abbott government. If you want to justify that, all you really have to do is look at the comments made by former Prime Minister Abbott in his Quadrant piece. I have read the commentary around his Quadrant piece; I am not going to purport to have read the piece itself. I note that the Leader of the Government in the Senate has also not read his piece yet. To paraphrase the former Prime Minister, he said, 'There is no stronger indication of the validity of our economic agenda than the fact that none of it has been repudiated by this government.'

We saw it in question time today, when the Minister for Finance, in answer to a supplementary question, confirmed that it is existing policy that the Clean Energy Finance Corporation be abolished. Let us not purport anything otherwise here. The government have that as their trigger. They are saying that is their policy. It is in the budget papers. At this stage, a double dissolution election appears to have three parts to it: the Clean Energy Finance Corporation, the registered organisations act and the attempt to bring back the ABCC. When the government choose to use all six of their questions in question time today to ask themselves dorothy dixers regarding the ABCC, you do not have to be a rocket scientist to see that they are clearly lining that up as a mechanism for a double dissolution election.

I am not scared of a double dissolution election; in fact, I would welcome it. I think the sooner we go to the polls, the better. But let us be clear about what happens if the government wins. If the government wins a double dissolution election, it is a bad outcome for those of us who believe in progressive causes. It is a bad outcome when the Clean Energy Finance Corporation—