Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern and Remote Australia) Share this | Hansard source

It is. Thank you, Madam Acting Deputy President. I appreciate your advice and the advice of the Clerk, through you. That was a motion moved by the government and I simply wanted to speak to the motion of printing. Clearly, these reports need to be printed. But, in the printing of them, we should underline in the reports the area where each committee indicated that departments should get back to them with answers to questions on notice. It has become a continuing scandal under this government that these estimates committees set a date for the answering of questions put on notice by these estimates committees yet, in the three or four estimates committees that I follow regularly, you find that it is almost at the next estimates committees—well outside the date—before the answers start trickling in.

When you inquire of the public servants why it has taken them so long for them to answer the questions, why they have not abided by the orders of the Senate to put in answers by a certain date, most of the public servants, in a very embarrassed way—and they all have different styles of equivocating on this—make it clear that they have done their duty and presented the answers prior to the relevant date, but that the ministers then sit on them in their offices until the day before or occasionally the day after the next Senate estimates committees are going. This is something that this government has become renowned for. It is endemic. The government treats this Senate and the orders of this Senate with absolute contempt and it is typical of the way this government treats the Senate with contempt in so many other ways. In supporting the motion to print the documents, I urge that the agreements of the committees to have responses by a particular date be underlined and printed in bold.

Question agreed to.