Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise in support of this motion to suspend standing orders and amend standing orders so that questions must be actually answered in question time. I'm new to this place and, coming in last year, new to politics. There's a lot to learn. Some of the things that you learn here make sense and have been built up over the course of the development of our democracy over hundreds of years. Other things don't make sense and are out of step with the opinions of the general public. The inability of a parliament to draft standing orders in a way that means questions are actually answered is one of the things that doesn't make sense.

The crossbench has been working to try to reform question time, so that some common sense applies, since the beginning of the 47th Parliament. In trying to improve the rules of question time so that we get answers—or what the average person would consider to be answers—we've written to the Leader of the House, we've written to the Manager of Opposition Business, we've written to the Speaker, we've written to the Procedure Committee twice, we've made a submission to the Procedure Committee's current inquiry, and a number of us have also given evidence in a private hearing to the Procedure Committee. Despite all of this work within the rules of the House, we are not seeing any sign of reform in line with community standards. We've met with both sides of the House to try and drive this reform.

The way this amendment is drafted may not be perfect, but I think that it should not be beyond this parliament to come up with a form of words that actually requires people to give a commonsense answer to questions that are put in question time. Both sides of parliament are used to a style of questioning and answering in question time that means you can avoid it. It is considered clever within the culture of this House if you can avoid giving an answer. But this is not how the community sees it. It really detracts from the trust in our politicians if people do not give straight answers to really simple questions. So I think this is an urgent matter. It is something that our parliament needs to deal with.

We've had about 83 question times in this parliament, with about 20 questions in each of those question times. That's a lot of questions and a lot of time that we've spent listening to answers that often, if not usually, don't actually answer the question.

So I support this motion. I think that we can really do better as a parliament to rebuild trust in the community in what we are doing here as leaders and use question time to actually hold the government of the day to account.

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