2016-09-15
MR BARBER (Northern Metropolitan) — If it is of assistance, President, I will keep my hands in my pockets to avoid any gestures at anyone. When Ms Mikakos, on behalf of the government, described this motion to defer debate on the bill as an extraordinary act, two things immediately came to mind. The first is that it is a matter of routine in the other house that on a Tuesday morning the government with its numbers comes in and announces the guillotine and announces which bills will be debated or will be voted upon by 4.30 p.m. on a Thursday afternoon. This from a government that went to the election promising that they would be taking bills in the lower house to the committee stage so that they could be subject to routine scrutiny, so it is absolutely run of the mill in the other place. In fact they have become so used to it since the days of Jeff Kennett that it is hard to know if there is anyone down there who can imagine the Legislative Assembly operating in any other way.
But when it comes to extraordinary acts I have to say that what we have been experiencing over this year in relation to some important constitutional matters has been quite extraordinary. First of all, after a very long series of debates and having given the government ample opportunity in relation to a number of important documents motions, this chamber passed a lawful motion to suspend the Leader of the Government from the house until such time as he provided certain documents to the chamber. The documents are important documents relating to matters such as coal development. They relate to level crossings and signalisation of the Cranbourne-Pakenham line. They relate to a huge privately funded road project that is coming from the western suburbs into the central city, and so on and so forth.
These are matters that continue to be considered very important from the public's point of view. Ask some people on the trains last night and the night before if they think the government's plans or changes to plans for signalisation and level crossings are an important matter of public interest. Should this Parliament be demanding some sort of explanation from the government about why it has cancelled one set of plans and introduced another set of plans in relation to our rail system, and so on and so forth?
Since it is the Attorney-General who writes to the chamber in regard to those documents motions, I did seek a meeting with the Attorney-General to discuss the documents motions, to discuss the documents and to work out what we could do about those. I did have the meeting, but ever since that meeting the Attorney-General has been running around saying that Greg Barber has no interest in any compromise on this area and that he demands every single document be tabled every single time. It is unfortunate that my position has been misrepresented in that way, because it is actually one of the barriers to us moving forward, if indeed that is the version he is giving to the public, to this house and perhaps to his own colleagues. There is still plenty of room for negotiation and movement in relation to those documents.
But the government in tit-for-tat fashion — they have admitted it — decided to do another extraordinary act, and that is to prevent a joint sitting and to prevent a member taking up his seat in this house. We have spoken on that a number of times, and every time I have spoken on that motion I think I have been pretty clear in articulating how seriously the Greens take that move by the government and how it puts us into extraordinarily dangerous constitutional territory. I have repeated that on a number of occasions when we have debated that motion, and the government appears to be implacable on that. But now they are shocked.
There is one matter that we could be dealing with here today if we move our way down the notice paper. Order of the day 26 in relation to the joint sitting may be what we end up debating today, as is necessary.
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