COMMITTEES

Senator DAVID POCOCK (Australian Capital Territory) (11:28): I move an amendment to the amendment moved by Senator Duniam: Omit "17 April 2025", substitute "25 March 2025". I voted against this guillotine earlier, despite supporting the WGEA bill and this bill. I think it's a great shame that, on what I'm hearing might be the last day of parliament, we yet again have a bill introduced into the parliament at the last minute and not subject to any parliamentary scrutiny.

We have a sitting week in March. We have a prime minister who's told us that he's going full term, and he's told us that he's a man of his word. So I take him at his word and I believe that we will be back in March.

This will allow us to have a short Senate inquiry to delve into the issues. As Senator Cash often reminds us, the devil is in the detail, and that's what the house of review is here for. We saw last night a deal to ram through the biggest electoral reforms in 40 years, with no Senate scrutiny, and the crossbench— Senator Gallagher: Oh, come on!

There's been inquiry after inquiry into electoral reform. The PRESIDENT: Order, Senator Gallagher. Senator DAVID POCOCK: It's convenient for the government to say that JSCEM made broad recommendations and that the government are simply implementing those.

It's very inconvenient for the government that JSCEM recommended additional Territory senators, and it was in the Labor Party platform to have delivered extra Territory senators. Then, last night, the Labor Party voted against that, despite there being the numbers on the crossbench to support additional representation for the territories. But I digress after the interjection from Minister Gallagher.

I don't understand why we have Labor trying to ram through more legislation today without any parliamentary scrutiny. Let's have some respect for the Senate. I think there are legitimate reasons to support guillotines when there has been scrutiny and some debate, and the Senate just needs to deal with things.

We've seen in that past that, during these big guillotines, a lot of the bills don't even go to a division, because the Senate has largely worked through the bills. Some may even be noncontroversial but have been hanging around for a while. I don't think this is the case with this bill.

Again, whilst I support what I've seen of this bill from Mr Bowen and have said to him myself that I support it in principle, I do think a short Senate inquiry would be worthwhile. I do not buy some of the rhetoric coming from the coalition on their stance on nuclear. We've heard from other former Liberals who are very open about it just being a front to continue the use of coal and gas.

We do need to get on with transitioning not just our electricity sector—that's very important—but genuinely transitioning. So I give the government credit; they are committed to 82 per cent renewables, but they're also committed to expanding the fossil fuel industry, continuing to export gas and using Japan as an excuse to export gas. Well, we now know that Japan are exporting more gas than we export to Japan, which doesn't make a lot of sense.

We hold them up as the reason we need to make life a lot harder for young people and future generations. On this one, I'm going to stick to my principles. I'll be supporting a referral here.

I hope the Senate will look at this for a few weeks and come back in March, and the government will certainly have the numbers to pass it. The PRESIDENT: The question is that the amendment as moved by Senator David Pocock to Senator Duniam's amendment be agreed to.