Philip Ruddock (Berowra, Liberal Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

The fact is that there is a requirement for reporting to the parliament. There is an annual report of the department. My colleague in the other place—and I am surprised that the member did not know of this—gave an assurance that this information, in the form in which it has been outlined, will be included in the annual report. It is a question of whether you have a multiplicity of reports or whether you include it in the relevant statute. We have no problem with the information being made available to the parliament, and more broadly, in the annual report. We do not regard it as being inappropriate. That is the point that I am making.

In fact, a number of my colleagues were interested in this issue. You may imagine that we discussed it; we did. My colleagues who are on the committee tend to be on my backbench committee. If people have an interest, they carry it through from parliamentary committees to party committees. My colleagues accepted the explanation that we did not think that it was necessary to put in a separate reporting requirement.

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