Page 5394 - Week 14 - Thursday, 30 November 2017
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In moving this motion today I acknowledge the conversations that have been had in this Assembly over the break and on Tuesday and since Tuesday with Mr Rattenbury. Not to steal Mr Rattenbury’s thunder but to address the issues, I foreshadow that Mr Rattenbury will be moving an amendment to my motion which originally sought to refer continuing resolution 9 to the Administration and Procedure Committee to include some of the elements I raised in the motion I attempted to move and which is now on the notice paper at Assembly business item No 5 in relation to matters of privilege.
Through the discussions Mr Rattenbury and I have had I think this is a neat outcome and will obviate the need for two separate inquiries: one retrospective and one prospective. But I wish to speak to the substantive issues while indicating that the Liberals will be supporting Mr Rattenbury’s amendment in full. At the conclusion of the debate I propose to seek leave to remove my Assembly item No 5 from the notice paper for the sake of neatness.
This matter has been one I have been contemplating for some time and it has evolved over time. We all have been aware of the issues relating to citizenship and clause 44 of the Australian constitution and the implications that has had for many members of the House of Representatives and the Senate. The fact that there may be other fallout from this issue is quite obvious.
When these issues first arose I took it upon myself to write to the Speaker in my capacity as the Deputy Speaker to raise with her that we may have an issue with the way we appoint senators by way of casual vacancy and that it may be opportune at some time after the High Court case to look at our mechanism for doing so to make sure that it is as robust as possible. The Speaker wrote back to me basically saying she did not believe we had an issue to look at and that because this was an issue that required statutory declarations we had to rely on the person providing the statutory declaration.
I initially decided to move this motion but, in preparing it, I went back and reviewed some of the documentation going back to the first time that we used this continuing resolution. For members’ information, we had to devise continuing resolution No 9 to address the issue of casual vacancy. We did not have a means of appointing a person to a casual vacancy until 2003 with the retirement of Senator Margaret Reid. At the time of appointing Mr Humphries, as he was then and is now, to the Senate we had to set up the continuing resolution 9 before we could proceed to appoint Mr Humphries to the Senate. We have used this continuing resolution only twice: once for Mr Humphries and once for now Senator Gallagher.
As I said the other day, I also was concerned because at the time of appointing Senator Gallagher I was the Speaker and I was concerned that I may have overseen something that was not as robust as it could have been. I hold some concerns about the decisions that were made and whether they were robust, and I want to be sure. If I had continued to be the Speaker I would have taken steps to ensure this myself, but I asked the Speaker to do this because I think it is important that the Assembly have as much control as possible over its decision-making power.
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