Copyright smh
Independent Senator David Pocock has slammed yesterday’s question time, and labelled the motion by Labor to make every senator sit through the entirety of question time as “silly”. Asked about yesterday’s “rowdy” question time on Nine’s Today show, Pocock said, “Question time, I think, is disgraceful a lot of the time. One, it’s question time, not answer time. You ask questions, don’t get too many, too many answers all the time. “And you can see why a bunch of independents in the Senate don’t actually go to question time unless you have a question, because otherwise, having to sit through an absolute rabble of people yelling at each other, you know, you really don’t learn much. So pretty disappointing. And you’d hope that politicians could hold themselves a little bit of a higher standard than a year two or three classroom.” Pocock moved a motion last week to extend question time by five questions every day to pressure Labor into releasing the long-awaited review into Canberra’s “jobs for mates” culture. “I’ve been trying to get this report out of the government into jobs for mates, and they’ve been sitting on it for over two years now. And so I actually moved a motion to extend question time until they provide a report that they said that they were going to provide anyway. We all know jobs for mates is a problem, and so they moved this silly motion to make every single senator sit through this tedious question time. It got absolutely slammed by every single non-Labor senator. It was a bit of a stunt,” he said. Appearing alongside Pocock was Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations Amanda Rishworth, who echoed Pocock’s sentiments on yesterday’s question time. “Things did get rowdy yesterday. I guess that’s just politics. My six-year-old probably has behaved better, but look, obviously it was a passionate question time... It’s an important accountability mechanism. But of course, we can all do better,” she said.
