Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to say a few words in support of the Chair of the Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Delegated Legislation; I am the deputy chair of the committee. This is a committee with a long history in this place. Throughout its 90 years of work, the Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Delegated Legislation has played an essential role in ensuring that there is effective parliamentary scrutiny of executive-made laws. It's a role that all of us in this chamber have a constitutional obligation to undertake. We are, of course, to quote Odgers, a 'house of review and reflection'. It is in this tradition that this committee has conducted its work on a bipartisan basis, with a focus on holding the executive's exercise of lawmaking powers to account.

In its 90-year history, the committee has never taken the unprecedented action that we are seeing before the Senate today, in concurrence with a statement that's been made by the Deputy Chair of the Senate Standing Committee for the Scrutiny of Bills about matters rising from the Biosecurity Act 2015. Senator Dean Smith, as the acting chair of that committee, had a statement to the chamber incorporated into Hansard shortly before these remarks. Parliament's role in overseeing the delegated legislation made in response to COVID-19 has unquestionably been constrained since the beginning of the pandemic. The powers of the Biosecurity Act have been the government's main legislative vehicle, and this has allowed the minister for health to make a human biosecurity emergency declaration, with its provisions to take effect despite any other law.