Motion: Session Orders Amendment

MOTION

SESSION ORDERS AMENDMENT’.

Thursday, 20 March 2025

Mr NEWBURY (Brighton) (18:05):

I can understand why the Government has moved this motion at 6 o’clock at the end of a sitting week when no-one, they think, is watching.

But I do want to add to the debate in a number of ways, firstly by saying that this change to the processes and operation of the House, if I can put it that way, have not gone through the Standing Orders Committee, which is unprecedented.

This house creates a Standing Orders Committee so that it can consider in a bipartisan way the way this House operates, because this of course is where the Government is formed but this is the people’s house, and it does not presume that it is anything more than the place where all of the Members who are elected to represent their communities sit. It does not presume that one particular party exists and can come in and do whatever it wants in this place.

Every Member should have the right to be part of the decisions of this place, the running of this place. Whether or not their views are found to be the majority is a secondary point, but every Member should have the right. That is why the Standing Orders Committee exists. It provides an opportunity for Members in a bipartisan way to consider any changes in the way the Standing Orders operate.

There has been bipartisan support pretty much to use the Standing Orders Committee. What has happened today is unprecedented. The Government has said, ‘Hang the Standing Orders Committee. We’re going to do it our own way.’ We understand why they are doing it – because they do not want to sully themselves with having to consider issues before the House, to have debates before the House and to have votes in this House, even if they were to win them, and argue their point. They do not want to argue their point.

If I can start a few words into the start of the motion, this motion suspends elements of the Standing Orders themselves. The Standing Orders are the rules of this place. They are rules that have come together over time that have been agreed to by the Members of this House. What this motion says by its own definition is ‘We don’t care about what the Standing Orders say. We want to ignore what the Standing Orders say and’ – to quote the motion – ‘suspend them, ignore them.’ The three Standing Orders are in relation to precedence, orders of the day and when precedence is given. This Government is now saying, ‘We are going to suspend the rules of the House that have been written over time, we are going to do it without going to the Standing Orders Committee’ – a very, very important Committee in terms of the operation of this place – ‘and we are going to do it at the end of a sitting week when we think no-one is looking.’ It does not surprise me, because the Government cannot win an argument in open debate and they do not want to win an argument in the public square. They want to sneak things through. It is why they make every announcement at 4:59 pm on a Friday night of a long weekend. They have taken the old rule of taking out the bad news trash on a Friday night to a standard form. Has there ever been anything this Government has ever done now not at 4:59 pm on the Friday of a long weekend? What this government is doing is pushing through a change to bypass this Chamber.

One of the Members on the other side of the chamber just spoke about the federal Parliament. I was not going to go into this, but I will. In relation to the Standing Orders of the Federal Parliament, pretty much the Standing Orders that currently exist and the Standing Orders that were written when the Gillard minority Government came into force, on two occasions I helped write the Standing Orders and was part of the process to write those two sets of Standing Orders – well, the update of the first set. What I can tell you is whenever Standing Orders are considered – and this is a debate for parliamentary tragics, not for everybody – this Parliament’s Standing Orders are held up across Parliaments in Australia as the worst Standing Orders in Australia, at a State and Federal level. The Clerks of all Parliaments in Australia hold up our Standing Orders as an outrageous joke.

Tim Richardson interjected.

James NEWBURY: They do, because they are. These Standing Orders were first bastardised in 1999 and since then have descended into a frankly cursory document that means very little. In no way am I reflecting, but we now see Standing Orders not even upheld when they are in the Standing Orders. It means nothing anymore. We have a Standing Orders Committee. That means nothing anymore. We look at the Standing Order change today – what is the point of a Standing Orders Committee? What is the point of the standing orders?

The Government do not care, because they will get their win, they will get to set their motions in the order they want, and they will get to debate their sledge motions and feel very clever. I notice that the only people who have contributed to this debate are so new I would suspect that not one of them has read the Standing Orders. They would not have read the Standing Orders, because the substantive arguments that I am making have not been dealt with. Why has this not been through the Standing Orders Committee? Why has it not? Why has the bipartisan Standing Orders Committee been ignored? It does operate in a
bipartisan, respectful way. Why would it not be? Why would you want to then turn the Notice Paper from a report of what the Parliament has heard and considered, a report of that fact – that is what the Notice Paper is – into a Government document that it can use to its own political dividend whenever it feels that it wants to. Why would it?

The Government will not answer any of those questions. They will say, ‘This is a simple administrative change.’ Of course they will. I mean, everything they say is just not true. But what is a fact is that every single precedent this Government sets in terms of taking away the good-spirited way that this Parliament should work lowers how this Parliament works forevermore. The new low normal of this Government is the new low normal for this Parliament forever. This Parliament, if it was made up of good people, would recognise that and would call it out and say there are some lines that should not be crossed because we should operate well and we should behave in a way, as a Chamber, that provides Members with opportunities and does it in its terms of its reporting and how the Standing Orders work. It should not allow Governments to misuse their power, and this is a misuse of power.

The Government will say this is just about precedent, but no, it is not. This is a misuse of power that undermines the core instruments of this place: the Standing Orders Committee, the Standing Orders, the Notice Paper. It slipped through at the end of a day when no-one was watching. This is taking the low road that we know is a constant of this Government. We as a Parliament are going to be worse off for it, and it is incredibly, incredibly disappointing.