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

Thank you for your protection, Mr President! You will note, Mr Acting Deputy President Forshaw, that I have elevated you because of the way you are looking after me! It really does bring into question the whole purpose of question time. Why should we bother to turn up every day at two o’clock to ask questions if we know before we get here that, except from Senator Faulkner, we are just not going to get any answers but rather a four-minute TV presentation by whichever minister is here on whatever he or she thinks they have done that is good on which they may be able to get some publicity?

If, as in the British system, you tell ministers what your first question is going to be then you cannot have ministers coming along saying, ‘I’m only the representative minister here, so you can’t expect me to know the answer to that, so here’s my four minutes of telling you all how great I am,’ rather than them answering the question. If you give them notice, there can be no excuse for a minister coming in and not being fully briefed on the subject, whether it is in his or her own portfolio or whether it is in a portfolio for which they might represent a minister in the other place. For a start, the minister would have the opportunity of being fully briefed and would be able to give an answer.

The supplementary question, as I understand Senator Ferguson’s proposal, would then be on the same question. If there were a bit of blood sport in question time—and I am not suggesting that there would be—you could have some penetrating questioning in the supplementary questions. The minister would be required to give an answer, because he would have studied the brief and understood all aspects, and we might get some revealing answers, which is what question time is all about and, from my limited experience, that was how question time operated in the mother of all parliaments in London. You would actually have a good process coming through.

I am not sure how the Senate, if we did adopt this, would deal with it. Would the questioner be allowed one supplementary question and then would other people from his own party follow on with supplementaries or would it go to the crossbench or perhaps even to the government, who might like to be part of the process? These are the sorts of things that need to be worked through.

I am also indebted to Senator Mason for raising in his speech the issue of what is relevant. Again, Senator Ferguson’s proposal seems to require that answers be directly relevant to each question. I suppose that you could get a room full of lawyers arguing what is relevant, but it is possible to determine what is relevant in the normal understanding of the English language. In fact, judges do that all the time in trials where witnesses are being questioned. The questions in a court have to be relevant. Judges make sure that happens. I think the Presidents we have had over the years were capable of understanding just what is relevant and germane to the issue before the chamber.

So I look forward to further investigation, discussion and consultation in relation to this matter. It would be very useful, I think, in question time to be able to hold the government to account and to get reasonable answers. I would like to know why Mr Swan spent the first three or four months of his career as the federal Treasurer talking the economy down, talking about inflation exploding, when clearly it is not. I thought the Labor Party were going to get rid of the blame game, but Mr Swan and Mr Rudd both spent the first three or four months of their term in charge of this country talking our economy down.

We continued to ask questions about why they were doing it—putting it another way: why do you hate Australia so much that you are trying to destroy the economy? That seemed to be their approach. We have also asked a lot of questions about their past performance in government. For financial conservatives, the last time they were in power they left Australia with a $96 billion debt. We have asked questions that sought to distinguish between their claim to financial conservatism and the fact that they left a debt of $96 billion. We are curious to know how they can say that inflation is a problem—I do not necessarily agree with that; that is a debate for another issue—and that it is all Peter Costello’s fault if the inflation genie is out of the bottle. They are quick to blame Peter Costello about that. But then they trumpet that they have a $22 billion surplus. They do not seem to have the same consistency there to concede that the surplus was really Peter Costello’s—and congratulations to Peter Costello on leaving this government with a $22 billion annual surplus.

Remember that when we took office in 1996 the annual deficit in that year was some $10 billion just for the year, adding onto the $86 billion debt that was already there. We have handed over to the Labor Party a surplus that over the next five years is estimated to be, curiously, $96 billion in the plus. So from Labor’s $96 billion in the red we have given $96 billion in the plus, which is a huge turnaround by the Liberal government.

These are the sorts of questions that we have continued to ask the current ministers about and, quite frankly, asking Senator Conroy questions about the economy and about Treasury—lovely fellow that he is—is just a futile exercise. Clearly, he has no idea. But if this proposal were put into effect, then even Senator Conroy would have to come briefed with answers on the economy that were relevant and he would then be subjected to supplementary questions which would enable the senators to get a better understanding of what was happening and to hold the government accountable for what is clearly moving to be their mismanagement of Australia’s economy. We hope that if we can ask the questions, perhaps from opposition we can try to keep the government accountable, highlight their mismanagements so that, hopefully, they will do better and will not sell Australia down the gurgler. We know that Labor are a high-taxing government but perhaps by exposing their high taxes at question time we can impose upon the government to address their high-taxing propensities. That way we can perhaps play a role. So this whole new system, I think, is important. I have just about finished what I wanted to say but if nobody else wants to speak on it I will seek leave to continue my remarks later.

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