Federal parliament will begin on a sombre note on Monday as MPs and senators pause to remember the late prime minister Malcolm Fraser.
Parliamentarians are returning to Canberra for the final week of sittings before the government delivers its second budget in May, but normal business will be suspended on Monday after both houses consider condolence motions.
The mark of respect for Australia’s 22nd prime minister means the government’s push for the Senate to pass its mandatory data retention laws will be delayed until at least Tuesday.
The House of Representatives will meet at 10am on Monday, when about four speeches are expected from each side of politics in honour of Fraser, who died on Friday at the age of 84 after a brief illness.
Fraser entered the prime ministership in highly controversial circumstances in 1975 when the then governor general John Kerr dismissed Gough Whitlam’s Labor government, but won three elections before his defeat to the ALP’s Bob Hawke in 1983.
Fraser remained in the public spotlight as an outspoken advocate for human rights and, in recent times, a critic of the direction of the Liberal party he once led, particularly over its refugee policies.
The Senate will also consider a condolence motion before adjourning to Tuesday, when data retention is likely to be back on the agenda. It is one of the main pieces of legislation the government wants to pass before parliament rises for a long recess.
The House of Representatives last week voted in favour of the bill forcing telcos and internet service providers to store customers’ call logs, email recipients and other metadata for two years.
It followed a deal between the Coalition and Labor to amend the law to require police and government agencies to seek a warrant to access journalists’ metadata, clearing one of the hurdles to bipartisan support.
The fact that agencies will continue to be able to obtain other citizens’ metadata without a warrant will be raised by Greens senators and the Liberal Democratic crossbencher David Leyonhjelm during the Senate debate.
Labor will face the awkward situation of having to vote on a series of amendments moved by the Senate crossbench designed to enshrine greater safeguards.
The opposition is expected to hold firm on the deal it did with the prime minister, Tony Abbott, although some senators could choose to use their speeches to raise general concerns and call for greater oversight of security agencies.
Parliament is due to rise on Thursday and not return until the treasurer, Joe Hockey, hands down his second budget on 12 May.
The Senate has blocked or held up significant policy decisions that were part of the poorly received 2014 budget, including university fee deregulation and pension changes, while the government has dropped contentious elements such as the proposed Medicare co-payment.
Abbott is likely to face further scrutiny in parliament this week about the budget strategy, after he suggested last week that the measures would be “almost dull compared to last year” and would include tax cuts for small business and a families package.
On Sunday the assistant treasurer, Josh Frydenberg, rejected assertions that the prime minister had gone soft on budget repair.
In an interview with Ten’s Bolt Report, Frydenberg said the government had to cut spending growth, but $30bn of savings were “stuck in the Senate including around $5bn worth of savings that Labor took to the last election”.
He defended planned spending on childcare reform as being “important in terms of female workforce participation”.
Labor’s finance spokesman, Tony Burke, said Australia did not have “an immediate budget emergency” but was dealing with “a situation where the full trajectory, particularly over the 10-year period, is something that needs to be addressed”.
“There’s no point doing some massive, immediate fiscal consolidation that just hurts consumer confidence and has an ongoing impact on unemployment, which was what the government tried to do in the last budget,” Burke told the ABC’s Insiders program.
“We need to accurately identify the problem that we have, which is a 10-year genuine problem, to make sure that we do turn that around.”
The former Liberal prime minister John Howard said governments should never rest on their laurels on economic reform and he believed Abbott could stage a political recovery.
“I don’t doubt for a moment his political recovery skills and I don’t doubt for a moment his overall political skills,” he told the ABC.
Howard, who served as prime minister from 1996 to 2007 and was previously treasurer in the Fraser government, emphasised the importance of “policy consistency” and the need to “isolate your opponent’s weaknesses”.
He suggested the opposition leader, Bill Shorten, was like former Labor leader Kim Beazley because people thought he was a “terrific bloke” who did not stand for anything.
