Kelly Hoare (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Earlier this year the Standing Committee on Procedure decided to undertake a fairly wide-ranging reference relating to the maintenance of the standing and sessional orders. The maintenance of the standing and sessional orders is an ongoing issue that we have to deal with. It allows the Procedure Committee to review the sessional orders which have been put in place following its recommendations. Usually, the sessional orders would be in place for a set period of time. Sometimes it can be for the term of the parliament; sometimes it can be for 12 months; sometimes it can be for a period of 18 months. But following the application of sessional orders, the Procedure Committee will then go on to review those orders and to recommend or otherwise that those sessional orders become standing orders. So the sessional orders are basically interim orders which the Procedure Committee has investigated and then recommended that they become orders to ensure the smooth running of the parliament. The report that has been tabled deals with the anticipation rule, arrangements for debate of committee and delegation reports in the Main Committee, the duration of members’ statements in the Main Committee, debate times for dissent motions, provisions relating to the maintenance of order in the Main Committee, and three other minor matters.

I will deal first with the presentation of committee reports. The Procedure Committee recommended that a sessional order be put in place to allow committee reports to be discussed in the Main Committee. There was some discussion about when this would occur and whether the reports would actually be presented in the Main Committee or in the House. After a lot of discussion, we agreed that the reports would be presented in the House of Representatives at the usual time, before private members’ business on a sitting Monday, but that those committee reports could then be referred for discussion in the Main Committee. This expands the amount of time that members have to discuss committee reports. We are all on very many standing committees in this place and we all know that we put a lot of work into the final reports that are the results of a particular inquiry and into making recommendations to the government for action on particular issues.

In previous times, before this sessional order was introduced, it was usually only the chair and deputy chair who had an opportunity in the House of Representatives to make statements for five minutes on those reports. Over the past 12 months many committee reports have been referred to the Main Committee, which allows committee members as well as people who are not committee members but have an interest in a subject to make comment on those reports. One example I can think of which had a lot of members speaking on it was a report, from the Standing Committee on Family and Human Services, on child support which all members had an opportunity to come here and speak on.

During the trial of the sessional order until 9 October there were, in total, 14 reports debated in the Main Committee for a total of six hours and 26 minutes, with 38 members of parliament participating in those debates. However, we have noticed that there is still some unfamiliarity amongst members in relation to this procedure, so we urge committee chairs and deputy chairs to encourage members of committees to participate in those debates and to remind people that this opportunity is now available to them. The Procedure Committee recommendation was that these arrangements now become part of standing orders.

The second recommendation I will deal with is on changes in relation to delegation reports. Currently, delegation reports are formally presented to the Speaker in the time preceding private members’ business in the House of Representatives main chamber, and two delegation members have an opportunity of five minutes each to speak on the delegation. A lot of private members’ business and private members’ motions are waiting to be debated during that private members’ time, and the committee thought that more opportunity should be allowed in the House of Representatives to debate private members’ business. This recommendation allows for the opportunity for a delegation report to be presented to the Speaker not necessarily when parliament is sitting but as an administrative process, which happens now in relation to various parliamentary papers and legislative instruments. That frees up some time in the House of Representatives, but it also allows for that delegation report, if the delegation members so wish, to be referred to the Main Committee, where other members will have an opportunity to discuss that delegation report. So this sessional order allows, as I said, for the delegation report to be referred to the Main Committee, with the delegation members still having five minutes each to discuss that report.

The third recommendation I would like to deal with is on the maintenance of order in the Main Committee. The previous position in this place was that if a member was disorderly in the Main Committee—

Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Theoretically!

Kelly Hoare (Charlton, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Theoretically, if that were to happen—which is highly unlikely and has not happened on very many occasions—the only option available to the Deputy Speaker is to suspend the proceedings of the Main Committee and report the disorderly conduct to the House of Representatives. This particular instance usually results in the member being named in the House of Representatives and therefore being suspended from duty in the House of Representatives. The sessional order that has been in place for most of this year allows for the Deputy Speaker in the Main Committee to suspend a member who may be being disorderly—hypothetically—for 15 minutes without disrupting the proceedings of the Main Committee and so allowing the debate to proceed. This report recommends that that sessional order now becomes a standing order.

The fourth issue I would like to deal with is members’ three-minute statements in the Main Committee. Three-minute statements, as members know, occur in the Main Committee between 9.30 and 10 am on Wednesdays and Thursdays when parliament is sitting. If there were going to be some disruption to the House of Representatives, that is the time it would usually happen. That means that members’ three-minute statements could be interrupted but are still concluded at 10 am, which means that people who have their names on a list to speak about important issues in their electorates are denied that opportunity. The sessional order that is in place allows for the continuation of members’ statements for a period of half an hour, notwithstanding the fact that that may be interrupted. But the full time allotted is still half an hour. This report recommends that sessional order 193 relating to members’ three-minute statements be made a standing order.

Finally, I will refer to the speaking times for dissent motions. At the moment there is no time limit for dissent motions. The mover has 20 minutes and other members have 15 minutes until closure. This sessional order allows for 10 minutes for the mover and the second speaker, five minutes for other speakers and a time limit of half an hour. The committee looked at closure motions because of the serious nature of dissent motions; however, we have agreed not to recommend at this stage exempting dissent motions from closure motions. The committee does propose to keep the matter under review and will revisit it at another time. Another main recommendation of this report was the anticipation rule. (Time expired)

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In speaking to the report of the Standing Committee on Procedure on sessional orders—both seeing sessional orders that have been in existence become permanent standing orders and seeing a review of current sessional orders—I want to speak more broadly about the role of the Procedure Committee. Members of the Procedure Committee who have already spoken have outlined the sorts of changes that the committee has recommended, but I would like to begin by commending the work done by the chair, Margaret May, and by the other members of the committee, who take the work of monitoring the procedures of both the House and the Main Committee very seriously and see it as an integral and important aspect of ensuring that the business of the House is progressed more and more in a timely way and affords ordinary members more opportunity to speak and to represent their constituencies. I think it is fair to say that without the invention, if you like, of this second chamber there is no way in the world that this parliament could dispose of its work in the main chamber. We would have to sit many more days in order to achieve the same amount of work if we had not worked out a way for this second chamber to come into existence.

It still remains very confusing to many people and it was only this morning that I had cause to explain to a number of folk when we were discussing booking the main committee room that that is not this room—it is the room on the first floor with the tiers of seating and the large mural—and that this room is the designated chamber where we conduct business of the House using the method of sitting as the committee of the whole of the parliament. Therefore when we are dealing with detailed sections of a bill we no longer resolve ourselves into a committee of the whole for the purposes of debating each clause of a bill. We now leave the speaker in the chair and discuss the bill in detail, thereby reserving this committee-of-the-whole structure to enable us to conduct a lot more business.

We have developed that slowly but surely so that now, although we take no vote in this chamber, we are able, as the previous speaker, the member for Charlton, pointed out, to take disciplinary action, if you like, if there is disorderly conduct in this particular place, which I hope will soon be referred to as the federation chamber so that people know exactly where we are and what we are doing. We have developed the very useful practice whereby committee reports being tabled in the main chamber are now referred here virtually immediately so that the debate is concurrent with the introduction and tabling of the report. Delegation reports, which were regarded very often by people as a nuisance, now have a place to be properly debated. So gradually this place is becoming not only a functioning chamber, that allows us not to have to sit extra days away from our constituencies and to progress work, but also an innovative chamber.

It is in here that any member across the way from me could, if they wished, stand up and ask me a question about what I am saying now or in any other debate that we were having. It would be within my rights to deny answer to that question if I did not want to take it, but equally it is adding to the interaction of the debate across the chamber which we, as a committee, have felt has been sadly lacking. We would very much like to see the introduction in the chamber itself of the practice where, in a second reading debate, five minutes of a 20-minute speech would be forgone and the last five minutes would be available for people to ask questions of the speaker about what they have said.

Coming as I did originally from the Senate, I found it quite surprising when I came into this House that there was no standing order that prevented people reading speeches. It is not permitted in the Senate but it is permitted in the House. I personally find that a disincentive to seeing a better debating structure and people engaging with each other and having rebuttal, even in a second reading debate, which I feel could occur if the standing orders were different. However, I know that that would be quite a radical step for many.

In rising to speak to this report and to endorse the comments made by other members of the committee outlining the work that has been done and recommending which sessional orders should remain—whether the existing sessional orders that we presently have in force should remain as permanent standing orders—I really wanted to highlight the fact that we have been quite innovative in developing these new methods of procedures. It is an enormous compliment to this parliament that the British parliament has followed us in the establishment of a second chamber. This is the second time to my knowledge that that has occurred. I remember leading a delegation to London in 1999 dealing with delegated legislation, and the scrutiny of bills practice that we had built up in this parliament was subsequently adopted by the British parliament. So although we have inherited the Westminster system and our parliamentary procedures are based on that, we have taken it, via the Procedure Committee, along a track that has made us far more innovative and worthy of copying by our more established Westminster predecessor. I think that the chair and members of this committee can feel very proud of the work that they continue to do in monitoring the workings of the parliament and finding ways in which we can be innovative in developing a better interaction in debate and a more workable set of standing orders that meet the needs of the day and have prevented us having to sit more days by carrying out so much of our work now in this second chamber.

Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Firstly, this report seeks to entrench, by amending standing orders, a number of sessional orders that have been adopted by the House. In particular, as previous members have spoken about, the most significant reform is to have reports which were tabled in the House referred to the Main Committee on the same day. I suppose that the Standing Committee on Procedure considered a number of proposals. I must confess to being favourably disposed towards having committee reports introduced into the Main Committee, but I am not trying to quibble. I think it has been a significant reform that reports are tabled in the House on a Monday, with one speaker a side for five minutes. It is a tyranny; nevertheless, it can be followed up by a 10-minute debate in the Main Committee by not only those committee members who did not get to speak in the House but also anyone else who is interested in the debate. I note that the Manager of Opposition Business is here and will be contributing to this debate, and I welcome her contribution.

I must also confess that, when the committee considered the so-called sin-bin rule for the Main Committee, I had reservations. But I am very pleased to note that you, Mr Deputy Speaker, and your peers have yet to enforce the sin-bin rule in the Main Committee. This has been successful because this chamber has a unique characteristic that the honourable member for Mackellar was referring to—the capacity, for example, for members to ask a question. It is a much friendlier chamber and a much more intimate chamber than the House of Representatives and I do not think we would want to sacrifice that.

I commend honourable members who have been in here and particularly the good judgement of the deputy chairs given the new power. That they have not had to resort to it has been a good thing, but it is there should members ever need to be reminded of the power of the deputy speakers presiding in the Main Committee.

The other significant thing the honourable member for Charlton referred to is the preservation of adjournments and three-minute statements. Previously, if there was a division and you were unhappy enough to be on your feet or yet to speak in the three-minute statements or adjournment you lost that opportunity. On the Labor side it really was a great source of inconvenience, if I may put it that way, because we schedule well ahead. I understand that the government may have different arrangements, so they may not have been so immediately impacted. As the honourable member for Charlton pointed out, people like to use the Main Committee to talk about their electorates and issues in their electorates in those three-minute statements and the adjournment debates. I hope the Leader of the House will adopt the recommendations in this report in a speedy way.

I also acknowledge that, whenever there are extra sittings of the Main Committee, the Chief Government Whip always agrees to the scheduling of half an hour of three-minute statements. I would like to place on record my appreciation to him for agreeing to do that or initiating that. These additional opportunities are always welcomed by members on both sides of the House and I think that that is working very well. Perhaps later on we will need to try to entrench that in a sessional order or a standing order, but I have no complaints about the current arrangements and in fact quite welcome them.

I also want to make some other brief comments. For example, the Selection Committee was today faced with a request for 90 minutes for tabling of reports in the House, and that included one committee report where the government did not seek any time. Had they sought some time, it would have meant they would have needed 100 minutes.

In addition to the sessional order, what is proposed is a provision for delegation reports so that if a delegation so decides they can present their report to the Speaker and that delegation report will be automatically referred to the Main Committee and debated in the Main Committee. Why would we want to do that? Doing that frees up a bit more private members’ time and allows more private members’ motions. In fact, as the honourable member for Shortland knows, next Monday there will be one motion from the government and one from the opposition, which is a very limited period for honourable members to bring forward issues by way of a motion that are important to them and their constituents. It does not mean that delegation reports cannot be presented in the House as they currently are and referred to the Main Committee.

For example, I suspect that I would be pretty accurate if I suggested that the Speaker, in leading a delegation, would be unhappy to present a report to himself and even more reluctant, for reasons I do not understand—perhaps the Clerk can help us here—to speak in the Main Committee on that report. Therefore, the Speaker, for example, would always have the option of presenting his report to the House, and I am sure that that would suit his convenience. But I urge those who are leaders and deputy leaders of delegations to seriously consider the default option of presenting their reports to the Speaker and utilising more time in the Main Committee. All too often, the leader and deputy leader get five minutes each in the House and then do not take up the option of having the report debated in the Main Committee. If they did it the default way, they would get at least 10 minutes in the Main Committee each, which I think is a much more serious response to a visit and the success otherwise of it and what improvements honourable members should be aware of or need to make. So, as I say, if you were to be a deputy leader of a delegation, I would strongly urge you, Mr Deputy Speaker, to consider the default option. I am sure you will.

There are some tidying up resolutions and recommendations here. I am not going to go through them because they are pretty straightforward. But I would flag one issue and that is the private members’ bills. At the moment, the Procedure Committee deals with the explanatory memorandum. But I think there is a deficiency in this place in that honourable members who present a private member’s bill get only five minutes and there is never a debate or a vote on it unless the government of the day grants precedence. In my time in this place that has occurred with Ron Edwards, the member for Stirling from Western Australia, with an obscure timing bill—if I may describe it that way—that the government of the day accepted, and the member for Menzies with his euthanasia bill. I think that there are good private members’ bills and they should be encouraged to be brought forward. I think that there ought to be a proper debate and that government members ought to have an opportunity to respond properly to them. If people want some sort of brake on voting, maybe they could use the Selection Committee to determine whether or not a vote should proceed on a private member’s bill. But that is for the Procedure Committee to give its due weight and consideration to, and I look forward to that. I certainly support the report of the Procedure Committee.

Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Health and Manager of Opposition Business in the House) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is certainly not my intention after those words from the member for Chifley to experiment with the ‘sin-bin’ rules in the Main Committee and to be the first example of someone excluded, so I will try and behave myself for the period that I am here. The opposition are in support of the recommendations made in the report of the Standing Committee on Procedure on sessional orders and therefore we urge the Leader of the House to attend to them as quickly as possible.

One of the good things about the Procedure Committee is that it has generally, almost without exception, proceeded on a bipartisan basis. I think that that is very good. If we cannot review the rules in a spirit of bipartisanship then what is it that we can get done in this place in a spirit of bipartisanship? I note that that bipartisanship may well be challenged in the coming period when the committee looks at the question of the standing orders for question time—question time tending to be the most troubled and partisan part of the day—but one of the things I think we need to acknowledge about the image of parliament is that, whilst a lot of good work gets done elsewhere in the parliament, whether or not we like it, the public window into this parliament is almost without exception question time. Most Australians could not summon a vision of this parliament other than a vision of question time, because that is all they see on the news. I think that that is a substantial challenge for the Procedure Committee coming up and I trust that that review will proceed expeditiously and also in a bipartisan fashion.

I note that the Procedure Committee has made it its business to go through the standing orders and seek to review them for the use of archaic terms. I think we are now at the stage where, having done that, some of them need to be reviewed for meaning and for ongoing applicability. I know that that is the sort of challenge that the Procedure Committee does set itself, and there is more work to do on the standing orders.

In terms of the specific recommendations in the report, I draw attention to the speaking times for dissent motions. As someone who is from time to time called upon to speak to a dissent motion, I think the reduced speaking times are an effective change. At the end of the day, while it is a very serious thing in the House of Representatives for a member of parliament to seek to dissent from a Speaker’s ruling, the argument you are making is a procedural argument and it ought to be capable of being fully explained fairly expeditiously. Given that a dissent motion takes precedence necessarily over any other thing that may be happening in the House, it does serve the convenience of the House to deal with that motion as quickly as possible.

I note that, in the report, the Procedure Committee has left for further musing, if I can put it that way, the question of whether or not it is appropriate for closure motions to be applied to a dissent motion that is in progress. I urge the Procedure Committee to further consider that issue. As an opposition—and this has been true of oppositions irrespective of which side of politics has been in opposition—we have made only very limited use of dissent motions. It is not a routine event in the House of Representatives. It is something done only when we feel that the procedures have been so impugned that the matter has to be dealt with. I think it would be grossly unfair to suggest that it has been used as a tactical weapon by the opposition, and I think an examination of the Hansard records would bear that out. Given that, I think it is inappropriate for a member who seeks to move a motion of dissent from a Speaker’s ruling not to have the full ability to state his or her case and not to have the matter fully debated. Particularly given that the debate is now an expeditious debate delaying the House for only some 30 minutes, it seems to me that it is appropriate to make sure that speakers in such a debate get the opportunity to fully use their time.

I understand that a government with a full legislative program may become concerned if the standing orders are amended so that dissent motions always get a full debate. They may become concerned if there is evidence that that is then being used in a tactical way for no other purpose than delaying the House for 30 minutes. Should that become a norm in the House of Representatives then obviously I would understand that the Procedure Committee would need to revisit it. But I do not think that there is any reasonable reason to fear that that would become a norm. No behaviour in relation to dissent motions is being exhibited at the moment that would suggest it would become a norm.

This report makes a series of very good recommendations which increase the ability of members of this parliament to truly participate in their capacity as parliamentarians. One of the unpleasant things about the way in which our system is viewed is that there is an undercurrent that if you are not serving as a member of the executive then somehow you are not fully playing a role in this place. That is an analysis that I have always rejected. I think there is a very honourable and needed role to be played by people who come into this place and aspire to be great parliamentarians. I think that this report does increase the opportunities to do that. By facilitating further and better debate on committee reports, that is achieved. It enables people to better play their roles as parliamentarians.

One of the regrets felt by people who have served on committees is that committee work represents probably the nicest face of the parliament. Some of the most vexed issues in our society truly get inquired into in a bipartisan way, often with a lot of good work done in the process by committee members, who work extraordinarily hard to not only get through the documents but also do the necessary travel to hear views across the country. Often we have not paid sufficient regard to that work by allowing the full debate of committee reports, and I am glad that this report helps in that regard. I am also glad that it helps to protect members’ statements in the Main Committee. Of course, the job of all of us here, whether one is a member of the executive or not, at the end of the day is to represent a local constituency. In that regard it is important that people have fair access to parliamentary opportunities to raise issues affecting their local constituency. Some of those issues can be time-critical—things that people want to get on the record of the parliament at a fixed time—and, consequently, it is to be regretted when people lose their opportunity in the Main Committee because of matters in the House. I think the protection of those opportunities is a very good recommendation.

I would certainly support what the member for Chifley said about private members’ bills, and further work being done to ensure that private members’ bills can be the subject of genuine debate in the parliament—and particularly in this place, in the Main Committee. As people who have drawn up private members’ bills would know, and I am certainly in that category, they take a lot of work. It is not an easy challenge to set yourself, as a member of parliament, to draft a bill. Members therefore only do it if they feel very strongly about the issues. There are some social issues in particular that I think are probably best brought to the parliament by way of a private member’s bill because they raise issues which are most likely to be dealt with by a conscience vote by the political parties. We have seen examples of that this year. Indeed, they are private members’ bills that originated in the Senate but obviously the bill on RU486 and the bill that is before us on the appropriate use of stem cells and stem cell research have triggered very substantial debates and have originated as private members’ bills. To see a greater capacity for the debate of private members’ bills would be very good indeed.

The changes to the anticipation rule are sensible ones. We should acknowledge that it was honoured more in the breach than in the observance, even when it was contained in the standing orders. To recognise that by way of a change to the standing orders is appropriate, and when major issues are before the parliament, whether it be the sale of Telstra or the industrial relations legislation, it is inevitable that such matters will be the subject of inquiry at question time, as well as in parliamentary debates and matters of public importance discussions. I do not think we should exclude any of those opportunities through the use of the anticipation rule.

I conclude where I started—by congratulating the Procedure Committee on its work and indicating my support and that of the opposition for the recommendations contained in the report.

Debate (on motion by Mrs Gash) adjourned.