The Senate might have robbed the Turnbull government of a double-dissolution election trigger by delaying a vote on its legislation for a building industry watchdog.
The upper house on Thursday voted to send two government bills that restore the Australian Building and Construction Commission to an inquiry by a Senate committee and have it report back on March 15 - two days before parliament rises for a seven-week pre-budget break.
A vote might have to wait until parliament resumes on May 10, the day before a constitutional deadline expires on any double-dissolution of parliament.
The government already has a valid trigger in the Fair Work (Registered Organisations) Amendment Bill.
Attorney-General George Brandis slammed the Labor move as an "excessive indulgence" to delay debate and a vote until after the budget.
The laws had already been scrutinised by the same committee Labor wanted it referred to, he said.
In a bid to have the Senate vote on its legislation by March 3, the government gagged debate with a rushed vote in the lower house on Thursday.
Labor's delaying move was supported by the Greens and crossbenchers Glenn Lazarus, Dio Wang, Jacqui Lambie and John Madigan.
Earlier Senator Lambie said she had seen but not yet read a secret volume of the royal commission into trade union corruption, the document the government is using to win over crossbenchers.
"The great threat to the power and authority of the Australian state is in like two little-sized memo books. That is the volume," she said.
Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull showed the senator the volume, and read from its introduction, during their meeting at Parliament House on Wednesday.
"I can't speak about what is in there, but right now I am dying to have a look at what is in there because I believe it has actually been overblown."
The senator said "there had better be some bloody content" in the volume to justify Commissioner Dyson Heydon's findings and to win her backing.
Treasurer Scott Morrison told parliament the ABCC and an associated building code would remove the "scourge of corrupt deals" that had been sadly part of the history of that construction industry.
But Senator Lazarus wants the watchdog's powers extended to include corporate behaviour and corruption.
"Large building companies are not angels in the building and construction sector," he said.
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