Here's what shoddy, inadequate scrutiny looks like. Qld Labor are rushing through laws against peaceful protest. Submissions on the Bill closed Tues midday. Yesterday, the public hearing scheduled for 21 October was suddenly pushed forward to this Friday on the Premier's say-so..
As the only MP opposing the laws, I still haven't seen the submissions, and still haven't seen the list of witnesses. The hearing starts in 20 hours. Expert witnesses were given less than 48 hours' notice of the new hearing date.
We've been told that MPs won't get the submissions till 1pm today. Typically there are dozens of submissions, each 10+ pages long. For this Bill there could be hundreds. It's basically guaranteed that MPs will not have read them all when they're questioning the police & Minister.
That means MPs will be operating on the basis of what they've read in the Courier Mail, plus their reading of the Bill and Explanatory notes themselves. For the last month, Labor has been drip-feeding the Courier a series of sensationalist beat-ups.
There's no need to remind everyone but.. Queensland has no upper house. This "scrutiny" is as good as it gets.
The next time Labor or the LNP claim that responding to the unfolding climate disaster by cutting carbon pollution and creating millions of good jobs ***takes time*** remind them how they raced to get this done.
