Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to see Senator Ferguson has come into the chamber. He will no doubt refer to Senator Fielding’s remarks. I want to urge Senator Fielding not to dismiss Senator Ferguson’s suggestion out of hand. As I said this morning when this was being debated, we currently have a question time in this place with very few of the ministers ever being able to answer questions. Some of them give the excuse, ‘Oh, I’m only the representative minister so you can’t expect me to understand all this,’ so the whole purpose of question time fails. The purpose of question time is to get information from the government to hold them accountable, to highlight their inefficiencies, and there are many of those. That is not happening at the moment because most of the ministers are so incompetent that they simply are unable to answer questions.

There are one or two exceptions. I mentioned this morning that Senator Evans will occasionally answer a question. Senator Sherry does attempt to answer a question and, when he is in a good mood, Senator Faulkner will attempt to give a factual answer. The rest of them are just a wasted space. That is quite contrary to the way the previous government ministers always attempted to answer questions—perhaps not always successfully or the way the then opposition wanted to hear but there was an attempt to address the subject. Currently, there is rarely an attempt. You get a four-minute talk by a particular minister just talking about himself or how good he and his government policies are. It has no relationship to the question, although occasionally they will pick out one word in the question and use that to pad out the answer.

Unfortunately, that really diminishes the Senate. So the idea is to give the government ministers notice so that they cannot come in here and say, ‘Oh, sorry, I’m only the representative,’ or ‘I haven’t got a brief on that.’ I mean, you would expect that they would know without a brief but obviously they are not terribly competent. This way you will give them an indication of the sorts of areas that you are going to be questioning. So they will have an answer for the original question and then there is up to six—and Senator Ferguson can explain this much better than I can, and he will—or a certain number of supplementary questions, not just from the original questioner but, as I understand it, from right around the chamber. That will really elicit the sort of information we want.

After all, question time is not a game. We do not want to turn it into, say, us coming in here and saying, ‘How can we trick up this minister today and make him look a fool?’ We do not really have to do that; most of them look like fools by their own work.