Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) | Hansard source

Yes, it is true. It is absolutely true. We have sat here and have not been able to progress one piece of legislation, and that has built up a bank of bills that we would like to deal with before the Senate gets up for the year. There are still a whole range of bills that we will come back to in February. Most of them should be dealt with very quickly so we can progress them through the Senate today.

The amendments to the motion are minor in nature. They remove a bill and insert another one, and there's a longer period of time to allow for debate throughout the day on different tranches of legislation. This is the government's view. These are our priority bills. We would like as many of them as possible to be done. We've already had a good week in the sense that we've got Help to Buy through, we've got wages for early childhood educators through and we've got funding for schools through. All of these things were important. We got that done in the first part of this week, but we believe the Senate should have the opportunity to deal with the remaining bills throughout the course of today.

Obviously we are happy to continue to talk to people throughout the day as that motion progresses, but we do believe that putting some order and process around these bills so that everyone knows what we are hoping to deal with is the best way forward. I commend the motion to the Senate.