Senator Andrew Bartlett
Friday, May 06, 2005
 
Coming Up in the Senate next week
- more change to detention laws -
- legislation affecting University Student Associations may come to a vote next month -

The federal Budget appears on Tuesday, which also marks the start of the final 10 sitting days before the Government takes control of the Senate.

Before each new sitting week in the Senate, the Government sends around the list of legislation they plan to bring on for debate. Details of next week’s Bills can be found on this page of my website. There’s 17 Bills listed, but for me most interesting one is the Bill that deals with detention of people caught illegally fishing.

The detention of illegal fishermen is a rarely mentioned aspect of our detention regime, but it has some similar issues, with people detained on board their fishing boats in places Darwin harbour. It has overlap with immigration detention, and it makes sense to bring uniformity to the laws covering this area. However, making an area of law consistent with another that is currently being shown to be totally dysfunctional doesn’t seem like a good idea to me. The Bill has been sent to a Senate Committee for a brief look, and I don’t know what the attitudes of the other parties will be to this one.

In addition to sending us the list for the next sitting week, the Government also sends an indicative forward program for the week or two after that. I was surprised to see the latest list included the legislation aimed at gutting the operation of Student Associations (usually known as the Voluntary Student Unionism or VSU Bill). This has previously been rejected by the current Senate and I had assumed that the Government would just wait until the Government controlled Senate sat in August to bring it on. I won’t go into the detail of the VSU issue itself this time, as I’ve written about it a few times before.

The only reasons I can think as to why the Government might bring this on early is either (a) to look for political points in forcing it to be voted down, or (b) because they are apprehensive about some of their Coalition colleagues, such as the new National Party Senators, Barnaby Joyce and Fiona Nash, both of who have made general noises of concern about the extreme scorched-earth version of VSU which the Government is trying to bring in. Perhaps the Govt is worried about being forced to change it by some of their own and would rather have a modified version ‘forced’ on them by the current Senate. I think option (a) is the more likely reason, although there’s no guarantee they will bring it on in June, particularly given the large pile of legislation that they always try to cram through at the end of each session.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Friday, May 06, 2005 Permalink
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