Alan Ferguson (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the report be adopted, and the procedures outlined operate as a temporary order for the two weeks of sittings beginning on 24 November 2008.

If one were to take into account public opinion on the proceedings of parliament, there is no doubt that that portion of the parliamentary proceedings which would receive the most criticism would be question time. How many of you go back to your electorates and have people say to you: ‘Why don’t they ever answer a question? Why don’t people behave themselves better? They behave like school children. If my children behaved like that I would send them to their room.’ For a number of years, we have had constant criticism of question time in both the House of Representatives and the Senate. This is not something new with the change of government; it has been a criticism of governments of every political persuasion.

Madam Acting Deputy President, you would know that a couple of months ago I drew up a draft paper which was circulated to the Senate Standing Committee on Procedure, and then an initial report of the Procedure Committee was presented to this parliament. That draft proposal contained what were considered radical proposals, of which there were four key elements. One was that all questions should be put on the Notice Paper rather than be questions without notice. In fact, they are not questions without notice even now. As we heard yesterday and at other times, the Greens in particular give the minister notice of what they are going to question the minister on. So it is not questions without notice. I sometimes wonder whether those questions from the Greens are in order because, under the current procedures, we are supposed to ask questions without notice. That was one of the issues contained in the draft proposal paper.

The second issue was that of the length of responses to questions that were asked. The proposal was that the answering time for primary questions be reduced from four minutes to two minutes. If a direct question is being asked or indeed if many questions are being asked that cannot be answered in two minutes, then I am of the view that they probably cannot be answered at all. The proposal is that a restriction of two minutes be placed on the time allowed for answering questions.

It was then proposed that a number of supplementary questions could be asked by both sides of the chamber in relation to the primary question. There would be one minute to ask the question and one minute to answer the supplementary question. This was based on experience that I had gained from other parliaments around the world. Of all the parliaments in the world, I think ours is the only one that has questions without notice. In other jurisdictions, all questions are on notice for varying lengths of time—sometimes just for that morning and sometimes for a matter of days. My choice is that questions are on the Notice Paper by 11 am or 11.30 am.

The fourth element of the original proposal was in relation to the answering of questions. It would be a requirement in the standing orders that all answers be directly relevant to the question that is asked. This is the most difficult section because it is still open to the interpretation of the presiding officer as to whether or not an answer is relevant. If there were some clear direction that answers had to be directly relevant to the question asked, then at least it would give guidance to a presiding officer as to a limit on what is broadly relevant in an answer. There have since been several discussions by the Procedure Committee as to how this would operate. The original consensus view has changed somewhat in recent times, and that is why this report has been presented to the parliament today. It contains minimal or, what I would call, incremental changes, because they are certainly not as radical as those proposed in the first place.

The minor parties, in particular the Greens, wished to retain their right to have a question every day—and I can understand why, having had a question every day, they would want to retain it. We sought to compensate them for the fact that they would not get a question every day by allowing them to have supplementary questions on other people’s questions, but it was the choice of the Greens to retain a question every day. So we had to look at another framework to operate under. Once it was clear that, in order to accommodate that, we could not have more than two supplementary questions for each primary question in order to accommodate the numbers, my own party were not very keen to proceed with questions being placed on the Notice Paper. I was personally disappointed, but it was a decision taken collectively by my party and so I am quite content to go along with their wishes.

So what we have before us is really just an incremental change to what currently exists, in the hope that at some stage in the future, when we have seen how this works, we might be able to refine it and move towards the original proposal. But we will have to see how this works first—how comfortable people are with it, particularly in the area of relevance—to see how it will pan out in the future. The proposal before us today is that we reduce the answers to primary questions to two minutes and that there will be an opportunity for the questioner to ask up to two supplementary questions rather than the one that currently exists, with one minute to respond to those supplementary questions. This would allow, if the maximum time were used, the question to take up to seven minutes. It does not take that long now, in practice, and it will not in the future because quite often questions do not take a minute to ask and quite often the answers do not go to the full time limit. It would at least guarantee that the order of questions that currently exists would be maintained under these proposals.

A lot of time and thought has gone into trying to come up with changes, and I think even some change might change attitude and behaviour. The time that the chamber becomes unruly is when an answer has been going on for a considerable time and many people consider the answer not to be relevant. There are certain ministers whom I consider to be always relevant in their answers, and you find that they rarely get interrupted. The behaviour of the chamber is better when those questions are being dealt with than it is when we have what opposition parties say is an answer that does not deal directly with the question but skirts around the issue and is really a statement by the minister on anything other than the question that has been asked.

I hope that the Senate, in adopting these changes, will see that the supplementary questions are more related and responsive to the answer that has been given by the minister, because I think that too is important. Opposition parties of all persuasions have been guilty of writing the supplementary question before they come in here, and that may bear no relation to the answer that has been given.

I hope that even this small, incremental change will make a noticeable difference. Whether or not it will remains to be seen. As I said, I am personally quite disappointed that we were not able to achieve consensus on more radical change but I think it is a worthwhile idea to trial these proposals for the last two sitting weeks of the session. They will operate as a temporary order. We will have a chance to review them in the new year and maybe even to improve upon them and finetune them. I do not think there is any need for me to say any more; I know other senators wish to speak on this. I commend the report to the Senate and would hope that it is adopted.