John Murphy (Reid, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

At this time of the year, I usually provide the House with some details about trends in petitioning and the operations of the committee in the previous six months. The last time I gave the House a statistical update was in November of last year. To date, 2013 has exhibited trends in line with 2012—a steady flow of petitions received by the committee and a similar volume of in-order petitions received in the six-month period as compared with the previous year's figures. This indicates the public's ongoing desire to engage with their communities and their federal parliament through the age-old method of petitioning.

In the six month to date, including today's presentation, the committee has assessed 71 petitions. The committee expects to assess in excess of a further 15 petitions this coming week and more again in the last week of this parliament. If this figure were to be extrapolated over the full year, it would bring the total in line with the volume of submissions received in the 2012 calendar year, being 172 petitions.

Of the 71 petitions assessed, only 12 petitions did not meet the House's standing order requirements. This out of order rate of 17 per cent is half the rate of the previous two calendar years, and that is a very pleasing result for all involved in this process.

It is always disappointing and frustrating for petitioners to learn that, because their petition did not follow the rules set down by the House, that their petition could not be tabled and thus could not be referred for ministerial response. Obviously, where the members of the public choose to investigate whether there are rules regarding the petitioning process, what these rules are and whether they plan to follow them is not within the committee's control. But what the committee can do is ensure there are adequate and accessible resources to help citizens correctly prepare a petition. As such, the committee ensures petitioners can access information on the Parliament House website, in members' electorate offices and have direct access to secretariat assistance.

In 2007, the House procedure committee recommended in its report, Making a difference: Petitioning the House of Representatives, that information about petitioning should be available and visible on the department's website. It also recommended that the contact details of the parliamentary officer dealing with petitioning should be provided. These recommendations were implemented in 2008 along with the establishment of the petitions committee. As such, the committee's secretariat now spends a proportion of its time responding to the queries of prospective petitioners about the form and content rules of preparing a petition and about petitioning more generally.

One can therefore deduce that it appears that the implementation of the procedures committee's 2007 recommendations has made information about petitioning more accessible and has contributed to a lower rate of out of order petitions, and that is a good thing. Thirty-eight ministerial response letters have been received in the six months to date responding to 44 petition concerns. Over the full financial year to date the rate of response has been 74 per cent. This is a particularly strong result, given that 34 petitions of the 105 petitions presented since 1 July 2012 have only been tabled since 27 May in a period of time which would not feasibly enable responses to have been received and presented. Thus, adjusting for these recently presented petitions, the actual rate of response over the financial year sits closer to 100 per cent. What about that?

And finally, in addition to the committee's core business—receiving and processing petitions—as mentioned in my previous statements to the House, the committee also conducted three round-table hearings in the last six months: one in Canberra with public servants; and two interstate meetings with principal petitions. I thank the House.