Bob Brown (Tasmania, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Let me at the outset congratulate Senator Ferguson for the work he has put into this report. I hear and can understand his disappointment that the recommendations do not go further. However, he can take the kudos for the move to have question time looked at and for having a suggestion come forward that is going to enable more questions to be asked and more relevance to be brought to question time. This is not just because the chair is being empowered a little more directly to require relevance to the question from the minister answering the question but because it creates the opportunity for the questioner to ask two supplementary questions, one of which will occur halfway through the time that the minister has to answer the question under existing circumstances, which is when many points of order are taken in this chamber asking the chair to bring the minister back to the question.

I think this will be a decided improvement. The question is: will the goodwill come with it? That is what I would seek all sides of the chamber to keep well in mind. One difficulty with the bicameral set-up is that we do not have the relevant ministers here in the chamber to receive most of the questions. They are in the House of Representatives. I think the executive finds the Senate a bit of a mystery. The process of having surrogate ministers here means it is a two-stage process. One of the advantages of giving notice, which Senator Ferguson sought, was that the minister in the other place could see the question with three hours notice and furnish an answer. A lot of debate has gone on in the corridors about whether that would deprive opposition senators or crossbenchers of the time-honoured major function in question time, which is to try to catch a minister or the government out. In my view, the primary function is not that; it is to get information. It will take goodwill from the government to ensure that this works—that is, the goodwill to supply information and to make sure that information is available.

We have made no agreement on this, but I for one will be seeking to put questions on notice during the period of trialling here, and I will ask some of my colleagues to do so as well. If we do, I think we will get a better outcome. I agree with Senator Ferguson that change needs to be made, because question time is debased by the political pointscoring that is brought into it. It is sometimes embarrassing to hear questions being completely ignored and uproar in the house because of that. To give governments their due, they know that question time is being used as an ambush rather than as a genuine effort to elicit answers. All of us should think on that. I can tell Senator Ferguson and the other committee members, who are also to be congratulated for making this change, that I will be committed to trying to make this work over the coming two weeks. If it does work, we will get better information coming out of question time in the Senate, and that is a good thing for the Australian voters who put us here.