Mr Tony Burke (Watson, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

If I may, I will respond to the issues that were very respectfully and decently raised just then. I have a copy of that report of the Standing Committee of Procedure in front of me now and I will read from it:

The participation of government backbench Members should not, however, result in a disproportionate allocation of time to the government side, as is currently the case.

We have a resolution from that Procedures Committee that, when that practice has been followed, it has been wrong. And there have been occasions where what the member for McMillan describes has occurred in here. Originally, when this practice first started, the only people who would come in and question ministers were opposition members. That is how it used to happen. It used to be very, very rare for anyone from the government to stand up. So then the question and answer format just flowed.

The report from that Procedures Committee in the last term made clear that, with the participation government members, the logical way to make sure that you still have equal time is for the minister to not immediately respond to every opposition question; that sometimes the minister will sit back, allow a government backbencher to make a contribution and it will come back to another opposition question and then the minister will respond to the different issues that have been raised. But we cannot have a situation where it is debate, as this is, and the opposition is getting less than half the time.

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