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| Morrison has 'sought to weaponise this dispute' on discrimination in schools, Shorten says – politics live | |
| (35 minutes later) | |
| This seems helpful. And also – very dated? Can you not have a job and protest? Can you not be unemployed and care about things bigger than yourself? And also, there were school students there? | |
| SIIIIIIIIGGGGGGHHHHHHHH | |
| Just because these selfish gits don't have jobs doesn't give them a right to deny jobs for Queenslanders.Parliament is for all Australians. pic.twitter.com/wNbcdGBfUq | |
| Phew. | |
| That was quite the hour. | |
| Tanya Plibersek (just before she had to go) on why Labor won’t seek to amend the bill Scott Morrison has put forward: | |
| Why are we contorting ourselves with all of these - should we do this or should we do that? When the solution is simple. The solution is to remove the exemptions from the Sex Discrimination Act that allow discrimination against children. It is simple. And just as with marriage equality, every effort to complicate it is designed to delay and prevent this simple reform from occurring.” | |
| The division has been called in the House. | |
| Bill Shorten and Tanya Plibersek are being called back to the chamber. | |
| They said they will come back out. | |
| GetUp has responded to Tony Smith’s statement from a little earlier today: | |
| Parliament has today roundly rebuked the Hard Right’s attack on GetUp members. | |
| Last week GetUp National Director Paul Oosting called out Tangney MP Ben Morton for using the cover of Parliament to air baseless and misleading accusations about GetUp. | |
| “The Speaker has rightly seen Mr Morton’s attempts to smear GetUp as a vindictive conspiracy theory,” Mr Oosting said. | |
| “Mr Morton is one of a swathe of Hard Right politicians using Parliament to peddle false and misleading accusations – they can’t be trusted. | |
| “Scott Morrison and his Hard Right MPs have given up on governing in favour of trying to score cheap political points. | |
| “Parliament has told them today to pull their heads in and they should fall in line. It’s actually in their interests because everytime these Hard Right politicians attack everyday people for taking part in our democracy, we dig in.” | |
| In the House, Tony Burke is arguing in support of suspending the standing orders, mentioning that the parliament came together to pass the strawberry legislation in record time because it believed that was important – so surely, the health and wellbeing of those in our off-shore detention centres is also important. | |
| Bill Shorten on the Scott Morrison bill: | |
| I am not prepared to give up on removing discrimination against kids and respecting religion in our society. But what we don’t have today is a solution. So the question is - when you don’t have a solution, do you just engage in a train wreck? Or do you draw breath? I mean, the problem is that if you done have an answer today, you can either have a big fight and divide this country and start antagonising and making everyone nervous about who cares about what? Or does the Parliament do what we’re paid to do, which is we sit down and we keep working through the issue.” | |
| Miek Bowers was at the student protest in the parliament foyer earlier this morning | |
| Tanya Plibersek explains why Labor is against Scott Morrison’s proposal a little more: | |
| I’m worried that this will go down the same route at the marriage equality debate. Someone will be suggesting a plebiscite next. | |
| Now, just today, the Prime Minister further complicates issues by suggesting a conscience vote. Labor doesn’t need a conscience vote because every member of the Labor Party agrees it’s wrong to discriminate against children. I don’t understand how anyone without a conscience thinks it’s OK to discriminate against children. | |
| The vast majority of [religious] .. schools don’t want this in their schools. They’ve made it clear to us that they done want to discriminate against children in their schools. That they are happy for this change to proceed. They don’t want to use the exemptions from the Sex Discrimination Act. | |
| In turn, Labor has made it clear to schools, through the explanatory memorandum of our bill, through a second reading amendment moved by my colleague, Senator Jacinta Collins, that nothing in our bill prevents religious schools from teaching the tenants of their faith, from teaching religious instruction in our schools. There is nothing in our bill that prevents that. | |
| There is a very nasty scare campaign being run by the right wing of the Liberal Party saying that this somehow undermines religious freedoms, when it doesn’t. | |
| This is simple - do we support discrimination against children? Or do we not? If we don’t support discrimination against children in our schools, then we move the simple bill, support the simple bill that removes the right to discriminate. We should not allow this to be a complicated, by political agendas, other than the simple de sire to let our children live their true selves, not to be discriminated against in their schooling.” | |
| For those who like the detail, here is the whole motion Adam Bandt is seeking to move in the House: | |
| I move that so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent - | |
| 1. private Members’ business order of the day no. 17 relating to the National Integrity Commission Bill 2018 standing in the name of the Member for Indi being called on immediately and being given priority over all other business, except for Question Time, for final determination by the House; | |
| 2. immediately on conclusion of consideration of the National Integrity Commission Bill 2018, private Members’ business order of the day no. 23 relating to the Coal-fired Power Funding Prohibition Bill 2018 standing in the name of the Member for Melbourne, being called on immediately and being given priority over all other business, with the exception of Question Time, for final determination by the House; | |
| 3. immediately on conclusion of consideration of the Coal-fired Power Funding Prohibition Bill 2018, private Members’ business order of the day no. 25 relating to the Migration Amendment (Urgent Medical Treatment) Bill 2018 standing in the name of the Member for Wentworth, being called on immediately and being given priority over all other business, with the exception of Question Time, for final determination by the House; | |
| 4. Notwithstanding the above, if the leader of the House and the Manager of Opposition Business agree that Order of the day no. 1 relating to the Telecommunications and Other Legislation Amendment (Assistance and Access) Bill 2018 should be given priority, then that order of the day shall be given priority over all other business, provided that the orders referred to in 1. To 3. Above must be finally determined pursuant to 5. Below; and | |
| 5. if consideration of the orders of the day has not been completed by 7.30pm on Wednesday, 5 December, any questions necessary to complete the House’s consideration of the orders of the day being put to the House immediately and without delay or intervening debate. | |
| One to keep an eye on over the course of the day. | |
| Folks following the events of the week will know Kerryn Phelps is pursuing a private members bill to get kids and families off Nauru. What’s now come to my attention is there is some activity in the Senate to try and force this issue onto the agenda before parliament rises for the summer. | |
| Tim Storer is currently attempting to build numbers for a motion that would allow a government proposal, an amendment to the Migration Act, to come back on for debate in the chamber tonight. In the event that succeeds (and Labor would need to support it for it to succeed) there will be an attempt to insert extra amendments that would allow people to be taken off Nauru in certain conditions – so mirroring the Phelps bill with some extra conditions Labor is insisting on: that people being removed on medical advice need to have passed a character test and not be the subject of a pre-existing adverse assessment by Asio. | |
| The object of this exercise is to try and insert these new provisions in the Migration Act and get a motion of concurrence to the House of Representatives, where a simple majority is required to bring on debate in the lower house.We’ll keep you posted, but for now, it’s watch this space. | |
| Bill Shorten continues: | |
| But what really disappointed me and has led to myself accompanying Tanya out to talk about this issue is that 10 minutes later our prime minister enthusiastically bounded out to a press conference and said that he wanted to deal in a controversial fashion [with] the very measures which the government in the Senate had decided to defer. | |
| So we say to the prime minister that this partisanship is not where the debate goes. I get there’s legitimate anxieties from religious schools and we respect that. And I get that there is an overwhelming desire to remove discrimination against children. How could it be otherwise? The parliament hasn’t come across a mechanism which seems to get that balance right, but unfortunately, the prime minister has sought to weaponise this dispute and I do think that rather than looking for the angle, the prime minister should look for the outcome. | |
| There is no set of circumstances where this parliament should be voting to replace one set of laws permitting discrimination against children with another set of laws permitting discrimination against children. | |
| Bill Shorten is confirming that Labor will not be supporting Scott Morrison on his call for a conscience vote: | |
| The lower house has chosen to put forward a proposal which will replace one form of discrimination with another. I get that all sides of politics, genuinely I think in most cases, want to remove discrimination from the law books. I also understand religious faith being taught in schools. I don’t see the two goals as irreconcilable. | |
| However, while they’re trying to remove discrimination against children, I don’t think that the parliament has come across a mechanism that sufficiently reassures the ability to teach faith without actually re-introducing the same discrimination sought to be removed in a new form. | |
| Our legal advice about the government’s proposed amendment is that it has the potential to permit discrimination against students in schools both direct and indirect. The advice goes on to say that the provisions which we seek to put in would not prevent the provision of instruction in an educational institution. | |
| So we believe our simple proposal, which removes the exemption against discrimination against children, [is one] that works. | |
| Now, the government is not convinced of that. | |
| This morning in the Senate, Senator Cormann, the leader of the government in the Senate, and Senator Penny Wong and the minority party, the crossbench parties, all agreed that whilst we want to remove discrimination against kids, the mechanisms to do so weren’t agreed and therefore the matter should be deferred until there was more considered discussion and I can understand that that was a sensible course of action. | |
| Adam Bandt is moving a motion to suspend standing orders to bring on the debate on this bill, which Katharine Murphy wrote about last night, as well as the Nauru medical evacuation and the national integrity commission bill. | |
| So all of the crossbench bills at once. | |
| This will cause a division, which will cut short Bill Shorten’s press conference, I imagine. | |
| The kids are alright | |
| I believe, I believe, I believe that we will win. #ClimateStrike #Fight4Future #StopAdani pic.twitter.com/R5QBTZZXNb | |
| Very disappointing National Accounts figures today. The weakest quarterly household consumption figure in nearly six years. Liberal Party chaos and dysfunction is weighing on economy and households. | |
| The Prime Minister’s Literary awards have been announced: | |
| · Australian History: John Curtin’s War: The coming of war in the Pacific, and reinventing Australia, volume 1, John Edwards, Penguin Random House | |
| · Fiction: Border Districts, Gerald Murnane, Giramondo Publishing | · Fiction: Border Districts, Gerald Murnane, Giramondo Publishing |
| · Young Adult Literature: This is My Song, Richard Yaxley, Scholastic Australia | · Young Adult Literature: This is My Song, Richard Yaxley, Scholastic Australia |
| · Children’s Literature: Pea Pod Lullaby, Glenda Millard and illustrated by Stephen Michael King, Allen & Unwin | · Children’s Literature: Pea Pod Lullaby, Glenda Millard and illustrated by Stephen Michael King, Allen & Unwin |
| · Poetry: Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria, Brian Castro, Giramondo Publishing | · Poetry: Blindness and Rage: A Phantasmagoria, Brian Castro, Giramondo Publishing |
| · Non-Fiction: Asia’s Reckoning: The struggle for global dominance, Richard McGregor, Penguin Random House UK | |
| Josh Frydenberg on the national accounts: | Josh Frydenberg on the national accounts: |
| Treasurer @JoshFrydenberg: Unlike other economies like the United States, over the last decade, wages have remained a pretty consistent and stable level as a share of overall income.Profits are relatively stable as well.MORE: https://t.co/IM9RqifqxB #Newsday pic.twitter.com/HTxOTRio0c | Treasurer @JoshFrydenberg: Unlike other economies like the United States, over the last decade, wages have remained a pretty consistent and stable level as a share of overall income.Profits are relatively stable as well.MORE: https://t.co/IM9RqifqxB #Newsday pic.twitter.com/HTxOTRio0c |
| Treasurer @JoshFrydenberg: Dwelling investment is up 7.1 per cent through the year; at a 10-year high.New business investment is down 0.8 per cent through the year. Mining investment is down 13.6 per cent through the year.MORE: https://t.co/IM9RqifqxB #Newsday pic.twitter.com/xsUjBVJOrx | Treasurer @JoshFrydenberg: Dwelling investment is up 7.1 per cent through the year; at a 10-year high.New business investment is down 0.8 per cent through the year. Mining investment is down 13.6 per cent through the year.MORE: https://t.co/IM9RqifqxB #Newsday pic.twitter.com/xsUjBVJOrx |