Robert Ray (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

He inherited it from Whitlam. He inherited it from Gorton or McMahon or whichever other incompetent you had. I will come back to this, though.

Let me go to the details of the proposal, because they are quite important. The original government concept was maybe to go to 10 committees. Some people may wonder why the committee unanimously recommended against that. In part it may be that, in the discussions, the government thought: ‘We have to be cooperative here. We have to listen to the arguments.’ But it is very difficult to accommodate 10 committees, especially at estimates. The number of hearing rooms we have in this building and the amount of Hansard resources probably mean that we could not have five committees meeting at the one time. That is almost certain. Subsequent advice that the Procedure Committee sought and got basically reinforces that view. So the proposal for 10 committees really was not one that was attractive.

We then had the argument about how many people should serve on committees. We did point out that, if you had 10 committees and four government members, 40 backbench senators from the coalition needed to serve on those committees. That in turn would create a degree of absenteeism, inevitably. I do not criticise that. If you are on two committees, it is not possible to devote full attention to them. That very absenteeism would start to create difficulties and tensions amongst the committee members.

It is much better, I think, to go with eight committees. I would have preferred eight by three for government and eight by two for opposition. However, if you take it out of the estimates context and look at the references context, people were worried about how many people, if you only had six to choose from, could attend meetings interstate. We have all been through the embarrassment of having interstate hearings with only a couple of committee members there. It is embarrassing to this chamber and it is embarrassing to everyone. Maybe the suggestion that it be eight by four in the end was the best compromise we could have made. That is the recommendation before you today.

There are a number of transitional provisions. Senator Ellison has mentioned some. We think it is quite apt that you introduced this on September 11, Senator Ellison. You might as well destroy something again on that particular day so that we will all remember it. The transitional provisions go to transferring current hearings, which is quite a fair thing to do, I think. We do not have to go through reinstituting every inquiry and every piece of business before a committee. That transitional one is quite sensible.

The final thing that we have mentioned, which is separate from the restructuring of the committees, is the change to membership of committees when emergency circumstances require it. At the moment that requires the imprimatur of the chamber. Quite often, events that prevent people from attending committees occur outside of the chamber timetable and it is not possible to put substitutes in. We have not gone absolutely all the way with this. We have said that, if a senator wants to be substituted on a committee for a particular day of a particular hearing, they have to write to the chairman of that committee and nominate a participating member. That has the same effect as putting it through this chamber except that it is more efficient and it allows for emergency situations. It is only a temporary order so that we can see how it works. But I very much suspect that in a year’s time it will be made a permanent order—as we often do.

Wasn’t it good to see this emerge from the Procedure Committee unanimously after a sensible discussion! That is why I made the point in this debate some time ago that it is good to see all changes to standing orders go to the Procedure Committee. I commend the government for agreeing to it. I believe it sets an example that we should always follow. In the end, if we cannot get agreement out of the Procedure Committee, you can roll right over the top of us. We know that. We know that it will be a two-vote margin at least. But to have had that discussion, I think—