Labor has put 169 issues in the ‘too hard basket’. This obscure rule may finally force them to act

The Coalition and independents have resorted to obscure parliamentary regulations in an attempt to force Labor to respond to overdue reports, including the late Labor MP Peta Murphy’s gambling harm reforms.

The cross-party frustrations are boiling over as it is revealed the government has failed to respond in full and on time to 169 Senate committee reports tabled since 2022, covering a swathe of issues from preventing wrongful detention overseas to management of the South Australian algal bloom.

This masthead revealed in December that another 67 lower house committee reports, 50 of which were presented after Labor took government, sat ignored despite a requirement for the government to respond within six months.

Many are now years old, with Murphy’s recommendation that the Albanese government ban gambling advertising – developed with the support of Coalition and crossbench MPs and finalised months before her death in 2023 – sitting unanswered for more than 2½ years.

Manager of opposition business Dan Tehan said the Coalition was committed to using “any means we possibly can” to push the government to act on unanswered reports. He said some of the delays would be difficult to defend, including recommendations on preventing financial abuse published in 2024. The Labor senator who chaired the inquiry, Deborah O’Neill, said at the time that the report marked a “crucial turning point” in addressing financial abuse, which was a form of family violence often ignored despite its devastating consequences.

“Sadly, since the election in May 2025, the government has been doing everything it can to use its numbers to avoid scrutiny ... and now we’re seeing that in them trying to sit on these reports,” Tehan said.

The opposition on Tuesday tested an unused parliamentary rule that requires ministers to explain why a response has been delayed and make themselves available to committees for questioning. The rule has not previously been enforced, and Tehan urged House Speaker Milton Dick to intervene. Dick said he could only do so with a request from a committee chair.

Independent MP Kate Chaney has been rallying crossbenchers to lobby their committee chairs, most of whom are Labor members, to put pressure on ministers to answer for the delays.

Chaney said the lack of response to Murphy’s gambling ban proposal was a “particularly egregious example of government apathy” towards committee work, and that Australians had lost another $85 billion to gambling since the report was tabled nearly three years ago.

She said the Murphy inquiry, which she sat on, heard 45 hours of evidence about gambling harm across 13 days, but it was almost impossible to put a figure on the total time invested into the report, which was developed over nine months.

“We reckon there are 3500 people, organisations, academics, that have made submissions to the 50 House and joint inquiries,” the member for Curtin said. “[They] have invested huge time as well, and are waiting to see action on the issues that they care deeply enough about to put in a submission.”

Finance Minister Katy Gallagher said it was an issue she had raised with departments and government leadership.

“I do believe that committee reports should be responded to and in time, if that’s possible,” Gallagher said.

Independent MP Allegra Spender, who appeared alongside Chaney at a press conference on Tuesday, challenged Labor MPs to back their own work.

“My community expects that when we go to the trouble of commissioning reports and people in good faith come to parliament to give us their ideas, the government should at least have the courtesy to respond in six months,” she said.

Chaney said she was focused on the 50 Labor-commissioned House committee reports because the government had already decided they were important enough to investigate, making them “low-hanging fruit”.

Another 80 Senate inquiry reports sit unanswered, while 89 more have been given an incomplete, interim response, according to the latest report from the Senate president.

Chaney said Senate recommendations may be more difficult to implement because the government did not always commission the inquiries, though noted the scale of unanswered Senate reports was “next level”.

Governments are not bound to implement inquiry reports, but are required to respond within the stated timeframe.

But Chaney said the government had opted to put the reports into a “too hard basket”.

“If they’re going to ask parliamentarians to do this work, they need to make sure that they actually have the capacity to respond,” the Western Australian MP said.

She said the collaborative approach to the Murphy inquiry had made her hopeful about the work of parliament.

The lack of action on the Murphy report has continued to haunt the Albanese government, with persistent lobbying from the crossbench and Labor backbenchers now airing their frustrations.

Independent MP Monique Ryan brought the issue to parliament again on Monday by introducing a private members’ bill to classify gambling harm as a public health issue, though it can’t become law without government support.

Cut through the noise of federal politics with news, views and expert analysis. Subscribers can sign up to our weekly Inside Politics newsletter.