Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Government Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

On a point of order, Mr President: the difficulty is that you have invited the minister to answer that part of the question which relates to his portfolio. As I heard the question, it did not relate to any part of his portfolio. What it sought to do was use Minister Carr’s portfolio as a way of asking the representative of the Minister for Climate Change and Energy Efficiency to answer the question. The issue is this: we started first with the primary question, which was exactly the same in that it purported to ask the minister to address an industry certainty question but was really about climate change and then, secondly, the supplementary question dropped completely the pretence of being about industry issues and went straight to climate change. The question should be directed to the portfolio minister or the representative of the portfolio minister.