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

I will be moving the rearrangement motion in the Notice Paper. We will be seeking some slight amendments to that motion to allow for further time, considering the time we lost this morning to the earlier debate, to push out the times for the first votes on the bills listed in the notice of motion; I think they're being circulated now.

The bills we had listed to be considered at 11 am will now be considered at 1 pm because of the time we lost this morning to that earlier debate. The bills that would have been put at 1.30 pm will be moved to 4.30 pm to allow for more time and debate. The tranche of bills outlined at subsection (8), instead of being put at 5.30 pm, will be put at 7 pm. This responds to the concerns of those opposite and the crossbench, to have time to speak to those bills. The amended motion also seeks to remove the Electoral Legislation Amendment (Electoral Reform) Bill 2024, as we haven't been able to reach the agreement on electoral reform we had been seeking with the coalition—no surprises there that we weren't able to do that at the last moment. So we are removing that and inserting a couple of other Treasury bills, the Treasury Laws Amendment (Better Targeted Superannuation Concessions and Other Measures) Bill 2023 and the Superannuation (Better Targeted Superannuation Concessions) Imposition Bill 2023, to be considered in their place.

As I said in the earlier debate on Senator Lambie's motion to suspend, we have moved this motion because these bills need to get done and we have been frustrated this year in a minority chamber where we accept we do not have the votes to bring things to a conclusion and to deal with things in a timely way. This is, at the end of the year, our stocktake of important bills we would like to get done. We think there is a lot of agreement across this list and these bills can be dealt with pretty promptly. I think there is agreement on a number of bills, and where there isn't agreement with one part of the Senate there may be agreement with the other. We have support from the opposition for the social media reform and the migration bills, and we believe we have support for bills like Future Made in Australia from another grouping in the chamber.

It is a shame that we have got to this point. It's not unusual for an end-of-year motion to be moved. When we were in opposition, we tried to work constructively to get a whole range of bills through where we could. Sometimes it requires longer sittings of the Senate. This is our request to the Senate, acknowledging that we will have to win each piece of legislation on its merits, to deal with as much of this as possible. If there are bills here that don't get up, if we put them to the Senate and the Senate votes them down, then that's the view of the Senate. I'm hoping that a range of bills in this motion today will be supported by the Senate and that, hopefully, some common sense will prevail—that we will be able to progress a number of important pieces of legislation through today.

We would have preferred this to have been more evenly spread through the year, but we have seen weeks where the opposition have refused to pass anything, where there have been long filibusters—