Motion: Government Business Program

MOTION

‘GOVERNMENT BUSINESS PROGRAM’.

Wednesday, 12 November 2025

Mr NEWBURY (Brighton) (12:40):

The Coalition will not be supporting the Government Business Program.

What is clear is the Government has lost control of managing the Chamber. There is no doubt that the Government has lost control of managing the Chamber.

You see big Bills being introduced, and certainly we are not speaking to the substance of those in terms of being opposed to them. In fact, we are very, very supportive and have been calling for action in these matters.

We saw a press conference from the Premier today with a poster but no Bill. There is no question that most Victorians are looking on and saying, ‘What’s going on?’ There is no oversight, there is no proper thinking and there is no proper scrutiny in relation to what the Government is doing, and you can see that with the Government Business Program.

The Government is trying to push Bills that it does not want debated through very quickly this week and to have six Bills, some of them very, very meritorious and important Bills that will bring about important changes – so much so that we have been calling for the Government to meet its own deadlines, which it has broken; we have been calling on the Government to actually do these things quicker – but also hiding other Bills on the Government Business Program that it does not want to debate.

The Government does not want to debate the planning laws – it wants to hide those changes – and I am going to be interested to hear the debate from Members about how much they want their communities to have their rights taken away from them. I am sure not many neighbours want to have no more say about what is built in their communities, and I am looking forward to seeing how many Labor Members put out tiles on that little reform. I suspect it will be none. No Members will. This makes the point, on the Government Business Program, that when you mismanage a Parliament, when you do not properly understand how to manage the time of the Parliament, you have to try and add days, because you have run out of time. My view is we should always sit more than less.

Members interjecting.

James NEWBURY: I will pick up the interjection. As an animal of this place, I love every single sitting day, and I would love it even more –

Mary-Anne Thomas interjected.

James NEWBURY: All I hear from the Leader of the House is ‘We love you’. That is all I heard her say. I do not know exactly what she said, but that is what I think she said.

This Government Business Program shows mismanagement of this place, because there are very substantive issues that deserve time. They deserve time in terms of debate, but they also deserve time in terms of broader scrutiny from not just the non-Government Members but the community more broadly. When you are introducing bills with under 24 hours notice, you are not giving experts outside this place – and I am sure lots of people, probably far too many people, in this Chamber think they are experts, but they are not. The broader community and the experts genuinely in the subject matter have not got the opportunity to look at any of these reforms in detail. We have just seen a 500-page bill and a 150-page bill introduced – really, really important. But frankly we should have had it quicker, and there should have been a process built into that drafting that allowed experts to buy into it to allow sunlight and scrutiny.

That is the point that I would make in relation to the Government Business Program. When you mismanage a Parliament, when you do not fully think through what you are going to do, when you do not manage the processes of taking an idea through Cabinet, through your Caucus, into the Party Room properly, you get rushed and you get mistakes. We have seen, week after week after week, Amendments come into this place that fix things like spelling errors or mismanaged clauses in Bills purely because of rushed drafting. It is not in any way the drafters’ issue; it is that the Government have not fully worked out what they are doing.

Members interjecting.

James NEWBURY: I do take the interjection on the Premier. The Premier had a poster today on a Bill that has not even been drafted yet. There is another one we are going to see at some point when it finally gets drafted. But we have got the poster. We have got the big poster out there. We have got the tiles. We just have not got the Bill. We have not got the laws. I make the point that the Government Business Program is another example of mismanagement of this place. We certainly will not be supporting it, but that should not reflect on some of our views in relation to bills therein.