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November 28, 2024
JAMES PATERSON: Good morning, the extraordinary guillotine list in the Senate today of 37 bills shows that the Prime Minister has no intention of bringing the Parliament back in the new year before the election. I am seriously doubtful that the Parliament will sit in February because the Prime Minister is clearly clearing the decks to go to an election early. And the Australian people have to ask themselves, why is the Prime Minister keen to rush off to an election? What is it that he wants to hide? Is it the budget scheduled for March because it will have an eye watering deficit and deficits as far as the eye can see? What is it about the state of the nation's finances that the Prime Minister and the Treasurer Jim Chalmers don't want to be upfront with the Australian people about? What's very clear is the Prime Minister has a plan for his own re-election. The Prime Minister has a political plan, he does not have a plan for the Australian people. He does not have a plan to address the cost of living crisis facing our country. And if he was serious about addressing those issues he would deliver a budget and try and step up and face those challenges and improve the circumstances of the Australian people. But he has no intention of doing that.
JOURNALIST: Does the Coalition plan to support the majority of those guillotines, or do you want to hold some of this stuff up in the Senate for more scrutiny?
PATERSON: There are some bills on that list that we support and that we would be happy to facilitate the passage of. There are some bills on that list that we don't support and we think scrutiny in the Senate is warranted. Let's remember, a guillotine means effectively no debate, no questions, no discussion about these bills. They're going to be rammed through. And this is the longest guillotine list I've seen in my eight years in the Senate. So we'll negotiate with the government and we will try to reach a sensible landing. We don't think that it's appropriate to try and smash through 37 bills in just a couple of hours.
JOURNALIST: And one of those is an immigration bill that the Greens say is cruel and Trump like. What's your response to that? And obviously it's one that you're happy to put through?
PATERSON: Well, if we took the Greens advice on border protection and community safety we would be a much less safe country because they would have criminal non-citizen detainees free in the community without any restrictions at all, free to reoffend against the Australian community rather than deported as they should be. We will always act in the national interest. We will always put public safety first. We are very happy to see this legislation pass and we will facilitate that today.
JOURNALIST: Time obviously precious, yesterday a fair bit of it was taken up by motions including to suspend Senator Thorpe. Your thoughts on her behaviour and whether or not that was a good use of Parliament's time?
PATERSON: I strongly defend the right of any senator, Senator Thorpe included, to robustly advocate their point of view in the chamber whether I agree with it or not. But a line was crossed yesterday and regrettably, the Senate had to take extraordinary action to suspend Senator Thorpe. That hasn't happened in my time in the Senate and many Senators who have served longer than I haven't seen that happen. And it was because Senator Thorpe's conduct was uniquely egregious yesterday. It is totally and utterly unacceptable to throw papers at a fellow Senator, to be abusive in the way she was, and to storm out flipping the bird, that is not appropriate behaviour. And the sanction was appropriate. But as you say, it was unfortunate that the Senate spent a significant amount of time on that yesterday when we've got urgent matters to deal with.
JOURNALIST: All right. One of them is social media. Where do you sit on the security issues around handing over ID and potential, you know, facial recognition and whatever else is being effectively waved through without knowing what tools are going to be used to verify age?
PATERSON: I don't support compelling Australians to use a digital ID or a physical ID like a passport or a driver's license to verify their age. And that's why it's important that David Coleman has successfully negotiated amendments to that bill to prevent people from being forced to do so. That's a privacy protection that the Coalition has fought for and won and should give people some confidence that they will not be compelled to hand over identity documents, if they don't want to, by these platforms. The truth is these platforms have many other sophisticated ways to make very strong assumptions about the age of their users. And already some of these platforms are removing millions of users every year because they have good information that suggests they are underage without using identification, and that's the approach they should continue to use.
JOURNALIST: What about donation reform? There are some suggestions the Coalition isn't happy with the government's proposal. If that goes to a vote today, do you plan to support it?
PATERSON: Well, we've been negotiating in good faith with the government about this. We are trying to reach a bipartisan landing on this issue and the ball is in their court. It's a matter for them whether they choose to bring their legislation forward, and in what form, and we'll make a final judgement about that bill, when we see it.
Thanks everyone.
ENDS
