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

I present the first report of 2008 of the Procedure Committee.

Ordered that the report be printed.

by leave—I move:

That consideration of the report be made a business of the Senate order of the day for the next day of sitting.

Question agreed to.

I move:

That the Senate take note of the report.

The first report of the Procedure Committee of 2008 contains recommendations for amendments to the standing orders, and these will be considered in due course in accordance with the motion I moved earlier for consideration of the report. The report invites comments by senators on a proposal which I put forward to restructure question time, and it is about that proposal that I now wish to make a few remarks.

Over the past couple of years, I have studied and attended question time in a number of other parliaments throughout the Commonwealth that have the Westminster system. I can only draw the conclusion that the Australian parliament has the worst question time of any of those parliaments that I have visited. That is for a variety of reasons.

An enormous amount of time is currently spent on preparing answers to questions that are never asked, and the reason for that, of course, is that we have what is called questions without notice. In fact, it is questions without notice for some and questions on notice for others, particularly members of the government who ask ministers questions which have most usually been prepared by ministers, and the answers are already prepared as well. We are the only parliament, to the best of my knowledge, that has questions without notice. If we were to change the procedure so that all questions had to be placed on notice—as a primary question on the Notice Paper by 11 o’clock in the morning—it could save an enormous amount of preparation time by departmental officials and staff of ministers who prepare answers to questions that are never asked. As well as that, it would mean that ministers would then have no excuse for not knowing the topic that was going to be presented to them and they would have no excuse for not being able to answer questions.

Direct questions are rarely answered, yet we have other parliaments in the world where direct questions are directly answered, quite often in 30 seconds—not the sort of time that we take up here, in many cases. It is worth noting—and this is also in the report—that, while the standing orders of the Senate give senators the right to ask questions of ministers, there is no corresponding obligation on those questioned to give an answer. There are numerous rulings from Senate presidents, dating back to President Baker in 1902, that confirm and entrench this circumstance. This means that ministers, as long as they remain broadly relevant to the question, are free to answer as they see fit. This may take the form of simply reciting a preprepared brief on the matter or, in the case of the Senate currently, reading a preprepared answer from a monitor on a computer and providing only the key points that they wish to emphasise and/or using the opportunity to comment on the policy positions of other parties.

Question time is meant to be a time when the government has to account for its actions. I do not make any excuses for previous governments, because it is a practice that has taken place for as long as I can remember in this parliament. We see direct questions asked and short questions asked, which take four minutes to answer, and I have to say that most of the time those four-minute answers are scarcely or barely relevant to the questions that are asked. Another thing—and we see this in the other place—is that answers to simple, direct questions can take 10 or 15 minutes.

One of the things we are criticised for in this parliament is the unruly behaviour of members of parliament at question time. I tell you that the length of the answers and the prevarication that takes place are responsible, to a great degree, for the unruly behaviour that we see in question time. The Australian public judges its members of parliament by what it sees on television or what it hears, and the only part of Australia’s parliament that is televised completely is question time. Is it any wonder that the public’s opinion of members of parliament in Australia today—members’ standing in the community—is as low as it has ever been? How often do you hear people who come to this place, particularly the people who bring schoolchildren, say, ‘If my children behaved that way, they’d be sent to their room’? That problem is, I think, caused by lengthy answers. Short, direct answers that I have seen in other parliaments lead to far better behaviour than we ever see in the Australian parliament.

In particular, there are four proposals that I have made to the Procedure Committee which I would ask senators to comment on, because the Procedure Committee will be looking at this question again now that this report is available and circulated to senators. There are four major proposals that I wish to see used to radically alter question time as we know it today. The first of those proposals is that all primary questions be placed on a question time notice paper by 11 am. Ministers would then know that they would be asked a question that day; other ministers would know that they would not be asked a question that day by the opposition or by other senators. If ministers have no question that day, their staff and the department can do work which is far more essential to the running of Australia than preparing answers for questions that are not going to be asked.

I have proposed that for each primary question up to six supplementary questions be allowed, which could be asked by any senator, not just the senator who asked the primary question. This is what takes place in all of the other Westminster style parliaments in the Commonwealth, particularly in New Zealand—which, incidentally, I think has the best question time I have ever seen in comparable parliaments.

The third proposal is that up to two minutes be allowed to answer a question. In the New Zealand parliament, rarely is two minutes ever used to answer a question, because questions are answered directly; a person might say yes or no and then say, ‘The reason I am saying yes or no is so and so.’ That is the way they answer their questions there. The questioner is usually allowed to ask one or two supplementary questions, and then anybody else in the chamber—government or minor parties—can ask supplementary questions on that same question. So I propose that up to two minutes be allowed for an answer to each primary or supplementary question. If it is long enough in all of those other parliaments, I cannot see why it cannot be long enough in the Australian parliament, to get a far more sensible and orderly question time.

The fourth proposal, and the one that I think is the most important, is that answers must be directly relevant to the question asked. In standing orders there is a very loose reference to relevance when people are in debate. In the section of the standing orders relating to question time nothing is said about relevance. So we have relevance that relates to other debates. Because of rulings that have been given in the past, the President says, ‘I cannot direct the minister on how to answer a question; I only refer him to the question.’ If it were in standing orders that each answer must be directly relevant to the question, we would have a far more effective question time, there would be far more opportunity for other senators to ask questions by way of supplementary questions, and all in all we would be far more effective—and not only for the people in this chamber. How often do you hear people outside say, ‘Why won’t they answer the questions?’ It is not any particular government that is guilty of this; all governments, of both persuasions, have been guilty of fudging questions for a long, long time. So I think that would be an important change.

I urge senators to read and comment on this report, because the Procedure Committee will be discussing it again. It is hard to make radical change, and this would be radical change. We have no control over what happens in the other place, but I would hope that by putting some of these ideas into practice the Senate may shame them into doing something about their question time as well. As I said, governments of both persuasions have been guilty. Unless any other senator wishes to speak to the report now, I seek leave to continue my remarks later.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.