Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I do not intend to usurp the role of my ministerial colleagues, but I make the observation that before coming into parliament I ran an industry and tourism regional development board. At times, we had various surveys go to motels, caravan parks and the like. There was a similar reluctance to answer them. They were not about what the manager did in a day but what the various denominators were of price, occupancy and so on. I chastised a number of my members at the time by saying, ‘If you want to have a basis on which to go to government for grants and subsidies and the like, you’ve got to have accurate information coming out of the regions.’ I think most of them saw the logic of it.

With a thing like this, you do not know where it might impact. It might impact on child care or any number of other things when this information is fed into the computers. I would be interested to know, Parliamentary Secretary: if someone were to write ‘varies day by day’ on a part that they felt was an intrusion on their privacy or, quite frankly, onerous to complete, would that offend the form? I suspect it would not, and that they would just answer the things that they thought were reasonable in the circumstances. When you provide the answer, I would be interested to know whether there is that sort of latitude within the guidelines.

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