Scott Ryan (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Could I make a brief statement about a matter I committed to take away during question time yesterday. Yesterday, I committed to look at the Hansard of question time and consider points of order raised regarding the direct relevance of an answer given by Senator Payne. Upon reviewing the Hansard I am happy with the ruling that I provided at the time: that the minister was directly relevant to the question, which included a quotation from a speech made by the Prime Minister, by including other material from that speech in her answer. In deliberating on this, I consider it important that the matters the minister referred to in her answer were not simply any material in the quoted speech but were directly related to the subject matter quoted in the question, in this case foreign affairs and policy, and not an unrelated policy area that just happened to be in the same speech.