Senator ABETZ (Special Minister of State) (12:37 PM) —I understand there are no other speakers on this amendment, so, to quickly sum up on behalf of the government, as I understand it, there was no family impact statement in relation to this piece of legislation and therefore no statement as a result can be provided. Senator Allison was quite honest with the Senate when she said that this is the 25th time, or whatever it is. I think that the arguments about this have been dealt with on numerous occasions in the Senate previously. The Democrats do seem to have a tendency to want to legislate on absolutely everything. We think that is a bit bureaucratic, and it would be a bit unkind of me to remind the Democrats that their name suggests they are democrats, not bureaucrats. I would think that the sort of extra legislation that the Democrats always come up with and the extra work that it would entail is just extra bureaucracy which will possibly be of benefit one day to a lawyer or somebody else but not really of great benefit to the administration of the department.

I think that in general terms people would accept that the vast number of appointments that this government have made have been on merit and, whilst Senator Allison makes comments about jobs for boys, I would remind the Senate that this government in fact have the proud record of having the most women as heads of departments and, might I say, not on any quota or system other than merit. We as a government are very much merit-based and any appointments will of course be made on merit, because as a government we want to ensure that the government departments we run are for the benefit of the Australian community, and therefore we will be appointing on merit.