Senator Andrew Bartlett
Wednesday, August 03, 2005
 
Senate program for next week
The government has released their legislative program for the first week of sittings of the new Senate. As always, it can be found at this page. All the Senators elected at the last election will be sworn in, the Senate will elect a President (who as far as I know will be the Lib’s Paul Calvert again) and then we’ll get back in to Question Time and legislation. At this stage, nobody knows whether the government will significantly alter the usual procedures.

There is not a lot of politically contentious legislation listed, although the Migration Litigation Reform Bill is listed early on. This is another piece of politically driven tinkering with the Migration Act, allegedly aimed at discouraging ‘unmeritorious’ appeals against the government and therefore reducing the workload on the Courts. Because it is clearly driven by a desire to send a political message and by an antagonism towards the Courts, rather than by any practical mindset, it will probably be counter-productive. This has certainly been the case with other Bills in the past which were allegedly going to cut the caseload of the Courts but had the opposite effect.

There will be a lot of new faces in the Senate and some people sitting in different seats. I’ve also shifted to a different Parliament House office – my fifth since first entering the Senate in 1997 – so I have a lot of boxes to unpack, which is a very tiresome way to start a sitting period.

At the moment, the so-called Voluntary Student Unionism legislation has been listed by the Government, along with many other Bills, as possibly being brought on for debate in the second sitting week. This one will be an early test of whether some Coalition Senators will put the public interest ahead of political ideology by supporting efforts to reduce the negative impacts of this Bill. I’ve visited most of the regional campuses around Queensland over the past few months to get a better idea of what the practical impacts of this legislation will be. Tomorrow I’m going to visit the University of the Sunshine Coast, one of the newer Unis in Queensland, to get an idea of what the likely consequences might be on that campus.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Wednesday, August 03, 2005 Permalink
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