Tolerance for Labor mismanagement wearing thin

The Rudd Government has been warned the Coalition may no longer tolerate its failure to allocate sufficient time for the consideration of legislation when planning the sitting calendar for the next year, the Senate heard today.

During a debate on the sitting pattern for 2010 the Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate, Senator Stephen Parry, pointed out to Labor that its proposal did not cater for the usual backlog of legislation that occurs between July and December every year.

“There is a well-established convention that the Government of the day sets the agenda. The Government of the day will set the sitting agenda for each year. It is something that we have always agreed with and supported,’’ Senator Parry said.

“However, the Government has failed three years in a row to allow sufficient time in the sitting calendar for the consideration of its legislation.

“Since coming to Government, Rudd Labor has only scheduled 14 sitting weeks each year for the Senate. The Howard government never sat any less than 15 weeks (except in an election year) and sometimes as many as 19 weeks in a year.

“I have been on the record on three separate occasions this year indicating that the sitting schedule has not been long enough. You cannot just come to the last two or three weeks of a sitting schedule and say we need to increase the hours now. This should have been done when the Government set the calendar at the beginning of the year.

“The Government has been ad hoc in its approach to scheduling time to accommodate debate on its legislation, scheduling extra days as the need arises, which interferes with the commitments of Members of Parliament and their staff outside of Canberra.

“The sitting schedule needs to be `locked in’ well in advance; not a last minute rearrangement to accommodate a Government that won’t subject itself to scrutiny.’’

Senator Parry warned the Government that the Coalition had been reluctantly supportive of last-minute demands from the Government for extended hours over the last two years.

“But, going back to the middle of the year, I indicated that this would not go on forever,’’ he said.
Senator Stephen Parry