Bob Katter (Kennedy, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

Mr Speaker, you understand what I am saying here. There is a hell of a difference between putting substance in a question and blandly asking a question, because you will get a bland, boring and utterly irrelevant response. That is the point that I am trying to make here. I crave the indulgence of the House in stretching my 40 seconds, or however much time I have used up so far, and I appreciate the indulgence of the House in this. I use this question as an example, because there would be no way you could get that message across in under 45 seconds.

The Leader of the Opposition has said, 'We always ask questions in under 30 seconds.' I said to him, 'That is not right.' He said, 'Well, you know—most of the time.' But maybe it is the other times that the opposition is doing the job an opposition should do. The supplementary is a very valuable weapon—I go right along with that. I am very pleased to see movement in that direction.

Finally, I have great difficulty every week of my life in figuring out why this place is so out of step with the people. Even the people of North Queensland could zip down to their state parliament late on Monday night and be back home on Thursday night. A fair proportion of federal members—members from Western Australia, members from Northern Australia, members from Tasmania—would find the best part of a day gone getting here. We spend a day getting down here and a day getting back. If you are in a party you are not allowed to go uptown to speak to the public servants, so you never get to speak to a public servant. But in the state parliament you could stay an extra day to speak to a public servant and still have three days back in your electorate. It is almost impossible for so many of us to be in our electorate—even the member for New England takes the best part of a day to get home, although geographically he is not that far away. I am sure there are other members in the same situation as the member for New England. Spending time down here means we are not interfacing with the people. All of us would know that if you want a project done—for example, I am spending immense time on getting a safe harbour in North Queensland—we need that time back there to organise it and to show the leadership that anyone who is an elected representative should show in the area he represents. The member needs to say, 'This is what has got to be done, fellas, and this is how we have got to go about it.' Convincing the electorate is quite frankly more important and it is a prerequisite before we come down here to convince it.

The arguments put up on the issue of time are very relevant indeed. Remember that maybe a fifth or a 10th of the members here will take a full day—with good connections—to get here. It takes me, for example, eight hours to get here, and I am sure Warren Entsch is no different. The member for Dawson would be no different, and the members for Western Australia would be no different. That is if you are lucky enough to get all the good connections and nothing goes wrong, because you have about four connections to get as well. It is one of the reasons I profoundly believe that we are out of step. Even if you do not agree with that proposition, we are more out of step that we should be. I think most people in this place would agree with that. The decent members here would love to have more time to interface with the people that they are supposed to represent. The opposition, the member for Denison and I support the proposal of the time limit.

See this speech in context