Our second chamber, which is now called the Federation Chamber, commenced in 1994. I suppose the background to the initiative was that there seemed to be a lot of pressure on the time in the House, and it was not unusual for government to be, as we call it, “guillotining legislation” through the House, simply because there wasn't sufficient time for the House to be able to consider it. The whole thought behind what we now call the Federation Chamber, which is effectively a second chamber of the House of Representatives, is that it could run in parallel with the sittings of the House and consider, on reference from the House, a number of matters that would otherwise be considered and debated in the House of Representatives.
For example, the bread and butter of the Federation Chamber is the consideration of government legislation. Instead of the House of Representatives—the main chamber—having to consider all the bills that the government introduces, there is a Federation Chamber that runs at much the same sitting times as the House and can consider bills up until the very final stages.
The Federation Chamber is not an initiator of items of business and is not a completer of any items of business. It receives items of business from the House. It fully considers them, returns them to the House, and then the House finalizes the process. For example, with government legislation, all the bills will be introduced in the House and all of them will have their final third reading back in the House, but the whole middle bit, the consideration both of a second-reading debate as well as what you would call the committee stage of debate, can all happen in the Federation Chamber.
It's very interesting. If you look at the statistics since 1994, the Federation Chamber when it was first established met for around 15% of the time of the House. At one stage in the last Parliament that went up to about 50% of the time of the House. It has perhaps fallen away to the more traditional level of around 30%. As you can see, that's 30% that would otherwise need to have been occupied by the House and is now being occupied by a chamber running in parallel. It's had a hugely significant impact on the way the House can do its business.