Senator Andrew Bartlett
Tuesday, November 08, 2005
 
A Day in the Life of the House of “Review”
The Senate started today with a motion by the Government requiring the Senate to sit through until 11pm tonight and for the Tuesdays on the two other sitting weeks left for the year so that the government “can have the time that we need for government business.”

For a government that says it is keen to ensure time for debating government business, it is worth looking at the number of days it is planning to have the Senate sit next year. In the 4 months up until May 9th when the Budget is brought down, out of a total of around 84 work days, it is proposed that the Senate sit for a total of 11 days.

Some relatively uncontroversial higher education legislation was passed. We also had Question Time, which is full of questions but fairly light on in regards to answers. I asked a question of the Environment Minister about the Japanese whaling fleet that had just left on its mission to carry out wholesale slaughter in the Southern Ocean and whether he would use the International Tribunal on the Law of the Sea to try to stop it. He gave quite a good description of how “the whales will in many circumstances take up to 15 to 20 minutes to die in what we can only imagine will be an agonising, excruciating, painful death associated with drowning in their own blood.” However, his answer to my question was, in essence, “no”.

I also managed to get an hour debate on what is technically known as a ‘Matter of Public Importance” on the need for the Federal Government to establish a national Royal Commission into the sexual assault of children in Australia. This matter is the subject of a motion at this week’s Australian Local Government Association conference, and I was hoping to help build some wider recognition about the continuing seriousness of this issue. This debate drew some good contributions from Senators from all parties, although there was still more than a hint of the blame-shifting in suggesting that child protection is the day to day responsibility of the states.

The Labor Party also moved to allow the Senate Committee examining the Workplace Relations changes an extra six days to do their job. Even though the Senate does not resume until November 28th, the government had previously forced through a requirement that the Committee finish its report on the legislation by November 22nd. An extra six days could not have delayed debate or a vote on the Bill at all, but would have allowed more time for reading of submissions into the legislation and holding of public hearings. Not only did the government oppose this, rather than outline any justification for it, they simply gagged debate and voted down the brief extension. This sort of contemptuous approach of not even bothering to justify an action and just gagging debate has been standard practice in the House of Representatives for decades, but for the Senate, which has always tried to maintain a recognition of its role as a house of review and a check on the actions of government, it was as grotesque as someone shitting on the carpet.

posted by Andrew Bartlett @ Tuesday, November 08, 2005 Permalink
|


<< Home