Coalition and independents use obscure rules to force Labor to respond to overdue reports
The coalition and independents have invoked vague parliamentary regulations in a bid to force Labor to respond to overdue reports, including the late Labor MP Peta Murphy’s gambling harm reforms.
Cross-party frustrations are growing further as it emerged the government has failed to respond fully and in a timely manner to 169 Senate committee reports tabled since 2022, covering issues from preventing wrongful detention abroad to managing South Australia algal blooms.
This imprint revealed something else in December 67 lower house committee reports, 50 documents submitted after Labor took over the government were ignored, despite the government being required to respond within six months.
Many are now old, Murphy’s recommendation that Albanian government ban gambling advertising – Developed with the support of the coalition and different MPs and completed months before his death in 2023 – It remained unanswered for more than 2.5 years.
Dan Tehan, director of opposition affairs, said the Coalition was determined to use “every means possible” to force the government to act on the unanswered reports. He said some delays, including recommendations to prevent financial abuse published in 2024, would be difficult to defend. Labor senator Deborah O’Neill, who chaired the inquiry, said at the time that the report was a “critical turning point” in tackling financial abuse, a form of domestic violence that is often ignored despite its devastating consequences.
“Unfortunately, since the elections in May 2025, the government has been doing this: goes out of his way to use his tricks to avoid scrutiny … and now we see that they are trying to address these reports,” Tehan said.
The opposition will test on Tuesday an obsolete parliamentary rule that requires ministers to explain why the response has been delayed and be presented to committees for questioning. The rule had not previously been applied and Tehan said he would call on the House speaker to intervene, but it remained unclear whether the speaker had the authority to do so without a request from a committee chair.
Meanwhile, Independent MP Kate Chaney is rallying crossover candidates to internally lobby committee chairs, many of whom are Labor members, to pressure ministers to respond to delays.
Chaney said: No response to Murphy’s gambling ban proposal The report was a “particularly egregious example of government indifference” to the committee’s work, and Australians have lost a further $85 billion to gambling since the report was tabled nearly three years ago.
He said the Murphy inquiry he attended heard 45 hours of evidence about the harm of gambling over 13 days, but it was almost impossible to put a figure on the total time spent on the report, which was developed over nine months.
“We estimate that 3,500 people, organizations and academics who applied to the 50th Parliament and conducted joint investigations are currently on the shelf. [They] Member for Curtin said: “I have spent a lot of time myself and expect to see action on issues that they care deeply enough about to make presentations.”
A government spokesman said ministers and ministries were taking the necessary time to provide concrete responses.
“The Albanian government has responded to hundreds of committee reports, including clearing a significant backlog from previous governments, some dating back to the Howard government,” they said.
Chaney said he was focusing on the 50 Labor-commissioned House committee reports because the government had already decided they were important enough to investigate and those reports had become “low-hanging fruit.”
According to the Senate president’s latest report, 80 more Senate investigation reports tabled under the Labor Party government remained unanswered, while 89 received an incomplete, provisional response.
Chaney said Senate recommendations may be harder to implement because the government doesn’t always initiate investigations, but noted that the scale of unanswered Senate reports is “next level.”
Governments are not required to implement investigation reports, but they must respond within the specified time frame.
But Chaney said the government chose to put the reports in a “very difficult basket.”
“If they’re going to ask parliamentarians to do this job, they need to make sure they actually have the capacity to respond,” the West Australian MP said.
He said the collaborative approach to the Murphy inquiry made him hopeful about the work of parliament.
The lack of action on the Murphy report continues to plague the Albanian government, with persistent lobbying from different quarters. Labor supporters begin to make their frustrations public.
Independent MP Monique Ryan brought the issue back to parliament on Monday, introducing a private members’ bill to classify the harm of gambling as a public health problem, but it cannot become law without government support.
Brittany Busch is the federal politics correspondent for The Age and the Sydney Morning Herald.Connect via email.
