David Hawker (Wannon, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to suggest today to the chamber that it is time we instituted the ‘windbag award’. The reason for doing this is that anyone who has been observing question time recently would see not only that the time taken for giving answers is rapidly increasing but that the time taken for the whole of question time is now quite regularly approaching two hours. In fact, if we look at the comparison with the 41st Parliament, already we are seeing a 10 per cent increase across the board in the time taken to give answers. Furthermore, what we are also noticing is that the government is choosing to slant the answers to respond to questions from government backbenchers; in fact, 70 per cent of the time taken for answers now is for government questions and only 30 per cent of ministers’ time in responding to questions is for opposition questions.

I think what we should do first of all is look at who the main culprits are for these long-winded answers. I have a few figures on this. If we go to answers that take longer than five minutes, when we compare the first 10 months of the Rudd government with the whole of the 41st Parliament, we find that in the last three years of the Howard government answers taking more than five minutes totalled 199, but in just 10 months of the Rudd government the total for answers taking more than five minutes is already up to 162. If you look at the figures for 10 months versus those for three years, you can see how rapidly the Rudd government is moving to win this windbag award.

Let us look at individuals. If you go to the former Prime Minister, you see that over three years in the last parliament he took over five minutes to answer each of 67 questions, which is an average of about 22 answers a year that were longer than five minutes. Prime Minister Rudd in just 10 months is already up to 50 such answers—2½ times the rate of the former Prime Minister. The Deputy Prime Minister has had 26 in less than a year. We compare that with former Deputy Prime Minister Vaile, with 14 in three years. If we look at the five longest answers for 2008, we find that four out of the five longest answers go to Prime Minister Rudd and three out of those five answers went for more than 10 minutes. We can compare that with the Howard government and see that Prime Minister Howard only once in seven years took longer than 10 minutes to answer a question. I think it is very clear that it is time we brought in the windbag award, and the very clear winner of the windbag award has to be the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd.