Kelly Hoare (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Earlier this year the Standing Committee on Procedure decided to undertake a fairly wide-ranging reference relating to the maintenance of the standing and sessional orders. The maintenance of the standing and sessional orders is an ongoing issue that we have to deal with. It allows the Procedure Committee to review the sessional orders which have been put in place following its recommendations. Usually, the sessional orders would be in place for a set period of time. Sometimes it can be for the term of the parliament; sometimes it can be for 12 months; sometimes it can be for a period of 18 months. But following the application of sessional orders, the Procedure Committee will then go on to review those orders and to recommend or otherwise that those sessional orders become standing orders. So the sessional orders are basically interim orders which the Procedure Committee has investigated and then recommended that they become orders to ensure the smooth running of the parliament. The report that has been tabled deals with the anticipation rule, arrangements for debate of committee and delegation reports in the Main Committee, the duration of members’ statements in the Main Committee, debate times for dissent motions, provisions relating to the maintenance of order in the Main Committee, and three other minor matters.

I will deal first with the presentation of committee reports. The Procedure Committee recommended that a sessional order be put in place to allow committee reports to be discussed in the Main Committee. There was some discussion about when this would occur and whether the reports would actually be presented in the Main Committee or in the House. After a lot of discussion, we agreed that the reports would be presented in the House of Representatives at the usual time, before private members’ business on a sitting Monday, but that those committee reports could then be referred for discussion in the Main Committee. This expands the amount of time that members have to discuss committee reports. We are all on very many standing committees in this place and we all know that we put a lot of work into the final reports that are the results of a particular inquiry and into making recommendations to the government for action on particular issues.

In previous times, before this sessional order was introduced, it was usually only the chair and deputy chair who had an opportunity in the House of Representatives to make statements for five minutes on those reports. Over the past 12 months many committee reports have been referred to the Main Committee, which allows committee members as well as people who are not committee members but have an interest in a subject to make comment on those reports. One example I can think of which had a lot of members speaking on it was a report, from the Standing Committee on Family and Human Services, on child support which all members had an opportunity to come here and speak on.

During the trial of the sessional order until 9 October there were, in total, 14 reports debated in the Main Committee for a total of six hours and 26 minutes, with 38 members of parliament participating in those debates. However, we have noticed that there is still some unfamiliarity amongst members in relation to this procedure, so we urge committee chairs and deputy chairs to encourage members of committees to participate in those debates and to remind people that this opportunity is now available to them. The Procedure Committee recommendation was that these arrangements now become part of standing orders.

The second recommendation I will deal with is on changes in relation to delegation reports. Currently, delegation reports are formally presented to the Speaker in the time preceding private members’ business in the House of Representatives main chamber, and two delegation members have an opportunity of five minutes each to speak on the delegation. A lot of private members’ business and private members’ motions are waiting to be debated during that private members’ time, and the committee thought that more opportunity should be allowed in the House of Representatives to debate private members’ business. This recommendation allows for the opportunity for a delegation report to be presented to the Speaker not necessarily when parliament is sitting but as an administrative process, which happens now in relation to various parliamentary papers and legislative instruments. That frees up some time in the House of Representatives, but it also allows for that delegation report, if the delegation members so wish, to be referred to the Main Committee, where other members will have an opportunity to discuss that delegation report. So this sessional order allows, as I said, for the delegation report to be referred to the Main Committee, with the delegation members still having five minutes each to discuss that report.

The third recommendation I would like to deal with is on the maintenance of order in the Main Committee. The previous position in this place was that if a member was disorderly in the Main Committee—

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