Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

Touche, Senator Patrick. Deputy President, indeed I am responding in a little lengthier way than I did to Senator Keneally's question to me about unanswered questions, because of the way in which Senator Keneally sought to then elaborate more broadly in relation to those matters. I don't wish to take up the time of the Senate at length. I was simply making the point around the highly politicised nature of some questions. In other cases, we have seen, particularly this year, that questions often are in pursuit of sensitive matters, sometimes legally sensitive matters, that do pose extra challenges in responding or answering them. That requires either extra advice being taken by government in response, extra care, or, sometimes, highlighting the fact that such details are difficult to provide without compromising or prejudicing legal proceedings.

I again come back to the substantive point that I made, which is that this government, in this parliament, has responded to more questions than were posed in the previous parliament or were posed in the parliament before that. We have been more responsive than any previous government has been asked to be. We continue to seek to be so. We have been handling literally tens of thousands—something close to 35,000—questions posed through estimates or Senate chamber processes. That doesn't take account of House of Representatives questions. It doesn't take account of Senate select committee, Senate standing committee, House of Representatives standing committee, joint standing committee or joint select committee questions. They're all on top of the 35,000 that we have sought to handle to date. Indeed, we'll continue to do so and provide responses in as timely a manner as possible, but it is in the face of record levels of questioning and, in some cases, highly sensitive approaches too.