Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I move:

At the end of the motion, add “, but the Senate is of the opinion that, instead of restructuring question time in a manner that could reduce the accountability of ministers to the Senate, the rules relating to questions and answers, contained in past presidential rulings, which require, amongst other things, that questions actually be questions relating to ministerial responsibilities, and that answers be responsive and relevant to the questions, be written into the standing orders, and that the Procedure Committee, with the assistance of external expert advisers, review the effectiveness of question time and the application of those rules at the end of each period of sittings”..

At the end of my speaking time I will seek leave to continue my remarks to make sure there is no vote on this tonight and to give people plenty of time to look at the motion and my proposed amendment over the weekend.

Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Senator Fielding, have you circulated that motion in writing around the chamber?

Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am just doing that now. I will speak to it. As I said, to give people plenty of time on this issue, I will seek leave to continue my remarks at the end of my speaking time.

The Acting Deputy President:

Thank you, Senator Fielding.

Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The issue here is that we have a Procedure Committee report that says, farcically, that the idea of all primary questions being put on notice to the ministers of the day should be considered and put around to other senators and members for consultation. That is a farce. That is a holiday for ministers who do not get questions. They can take a holiday break at question time. Those ministers who do not get a question during the day can take a picnic. That is ridiculous. Here we have dorothy dixers from the government of the day with advance warning to the ministers of the day, and look what you get. Here we have a situation where the Procedure Committee says, ‘Look, it’s a good idea to consider having all the questions from this chamber being provided on advance notice by 11 o’clock to the ministers.’ What an absolute joke. I have never heard anything as stupid as this in my entire life.

The whole idea of question time is to make sure that ministers and the government of the day are held to account. The whole idea is to keep them on their toes; to keep them fresh; to hold them to account. I do not think that this is a good idea at all. I will read what it says in the report under ‘Restructuring question time’:

The committee has considered proposals to restructure question time with the aim of making it a more effective mechanism for seeking the accountability of the executive government to the Parliament.

Here is the proposal:

All primary questions to be placed on a Question Time Notice Paper by 11 am.

That is all the questions, so they will already know what the questions are going to be before they even start. I have been watching things a little bit here. Are you sure that you want Conroy’s laptop to be opened up, to spill out pat answers to your questions? Why don’t we just get him to turn around his PC to show us all?

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That wouldn’t be a bad idea. It would be more entertaining.

Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Really? Maybe all of the frontbench will have laptops out and there will just be this pat reading out of answers. I have never heard of something so absurd. In actual fact, if you think about what is being proposed, it is a backward step. Do you know why? This Senate can already place questions on notice anytime it wants. So why do you want to stage question time so that all questions are now to be on notice? It is a crazy proposition and a backward step. If someone says that we should be following New Zealand in this regard, I will go he! It is a joke. I cannot believe it.

I read it last night at 11.30 while the Comcar driver was driving me home. I read this report and thought: ‘I can’t believe what I’ve just read here. They want to put all questions on notice.’ I read further and found that up to six supplementary questions can be put without notice. But the minister has already gotten the gist of where the questions are going and can spend from 11 o’clock, to 12 o’clock, to one o’clock, to two o’clock—three hours—preparing pat answers on their computers. The whole frontbench will have computers. What a wonderful idea! This is absolutely crazy. To give others a chance, they can talk now or they can talk next week. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted.

Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I want to speak briefly on the matter. I think that Senator Fielding has misconstrued the report. It is not a recommendation; it is a suggestion for discussion. It has been circulated widely for this very purpose: to have discussion. We discussed it today during the adoption of the Procedure Committee’s report. While he has aired some valid concerns and some questions about the process, I am querying the reasons for the amendment. I might be incorrect, because it is only amending a suggestion. Is my interpretation of the amendment that has just been circulated correct?

The Acting Deputy President:

The motion before the chair is that the Senate take note of the report, to which Senator Fielding has moved an amendment. I hope that clarifies things for you, Senator Parry.

Stephen Parry (Tasmania, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—I ask Senator Fielding: what is the amendment? What is it actually amending? Is it amending a suggestion? I do not understand the substance of his amendment.

Steve Fielding (Victoria, Family First Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

by leave—The motion before the chair is as the chair put before, but I have also moved a motion which says, ‘At the end of the motion, add’ those words. I have circulated it in writing. The motion has been moved by me. It was definitely moved and it has been circulated. Then I sought and was granted leave to continue my remarks. So the motion is the original motion, plus that motion.

The Acting Deputy President:

That is correct, Senator Fielding.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to see Senator Ferguson has come into the chamber. He will no doubt refer to Senator Fielding’s remarks. I want to urge Senator Fielding not to dismiss Senator Ferguson’s suggestion out of hand. As I said this morning when this was being debated, we currently have a question time in this place with very few of the ministers ever being able to answer questions. Some of them give the excuse, ‘Oh, I’m only the representative minister so you can’t expect me to understand all this,’ so the whole purpose of question time fails. The purpose of question time is to get information from the government to hold them accountable, to highlight their inefficiencies, and there are many of those. That is not happening at the moment because most of the ministers are so incompetent that they simply are unable to answer questions.

There are one or two exceptions. I mentioned this morning that Senator Evans will occasionally answer a question. Senator Sherry does attempt to answer a question and, when he is in a good mood, Senator Faulkner will attempt to give a factual answer. The rest of them are just a wasted space. That is quite contrary to the way the previous government ministers always attempted to answer questions—perhaps not always successfully or the way the then opposition wanted to hear but there was an attempt to address the subject. Currently, there is rarely an attempt. You get a four-minute talk by a particular minister just talking about himself or how good he and his government policies are. It has no relationship to the question, although occasionally they will pick out one word in the question and use that to pad out the answer.

Unfortunately, that really diminishes the Senate. So the idea is to give the government ministers notice so that they cannot come in here and say, ‘Oh, sorry, I’m only the representative,’ or ‘I haven’t got a brief on that.’ I mean, you would expect that they would know without a brief but obviously they are not terribly competent. This way you will give them an indication of the sorts of areas that you are going to be questioning. So they will have an answer for the original question and then there is up to six—and Senator Ferguson can explain this much better than I can, and he will—or a certain number of supplementary questions, not just from the original questioner but, as I understand it, from right around the chamber. That will really elicit the sort of information we want.

After all, question time is not a game. We do not want to turn it into, say, us coming in here and saying, ‘How can we trick up this minister today and make him look a fool?’ We do not really have to do that; most of them look like fools by their own work.

Jan McLucas (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Health and Ageing) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You are just so nasty, aren’t you.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Sorry, if I am saying—

Mark Bishop (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! Senator Macdonald, you will address your remarks through the chair and other senators will not engage in banter across the chamber.

Ian Macdonald (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary Assisting the Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

How else do I indicate they are incompetent? If that is being nasty then, I am sorry, I am nasty. I do not intend it to be personal; I just want to indicate that I do not think they are competent or able to administer their portfolios. The way they act at question time, I suggest with respect, actually demonstrates that. The senator at the minister’s chair may wish to rise and defend them later and point out how good they are. But you only have to see the way they answer questions without notice to know that something needs to be done.

I am suggesting to Senator Fielding that he does need to have a closer look at this. I am not saying that he should necessarily support it but do not dismiss it out of hand because I think there is merit in it. We then might be able to return to the purpose of question time, which is to elicit information, to keep the government accountable and to try, through the style of the questions, to expose some of the various obvious inefficiencies and incompetencies of this very nervous and incompetent government.

Alan Ferguson (SA, Deputy-President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am very sorry that I only caught the tail end of Senator Fielding’s contribution after it was drawn to my attention. I was quite astonished at some of the statements he made and the misapprehensions that he is under. Firstly, this is a report of the Procedure Committee, which presents to senators some suggestions and a discussion paper which the Senate Procedure Committee will make some decisions on at a later time. It is a discussion paper. It is not a motion before this chamber. The only motion that was moved today by Senator Evans was to put one of the items in the Procedure Committee report into practice until the end of the current session.

I was staggered to hear Senator Fielding say that we should not be following the New Zealanders. I do not know whether Senator Fielding has ever attended a question time in New Zealand, but I certainly have, and in a number of other places. To think that Australia cannot learn from some other countries that follow the same Westminster system that we follow is showing a lack of understanding and a lack of appreciation. If we do not continually reform the procedures of this place—and they have been reformed over a period of time. For 108 years now we have changed the way we run this Senate and the way we run the House of Representatives. Surely it is right for the Procedure Committee to bring a discussion paper to this Senate so that every senator can have some input—not just in this chamber but in other ways as well, including to the Procedure Committee—and we can then move forward from there.

There have already been suggestions today that go outside the discussion paper that I put forward to the Procedure Committee, including some by Senator Bob Brown. He talks about the need to be able to ask questions that are urgent. If something happens after 11 o’clock in the morning and it is an urgent matter then the presiding officer should be able to allow a matter to be asked as an urgent question. That takes place in other parliaments. I did not include it in this discussion paper because I was too busy trying to get the basis of what we might be able to change without going into the details. But I have talked to Senator Bob Brown and I agree with his suggestion—I quite agree with it; as a matter of fact I have asked the Clerk to draw up some wording for our standing orders, which he has already done, and they will become part of the next discussion of the Procedure Committee. I cannot believe some of the wording in Senator Fielding’s amendment:

... that that Senate is of the opinion that instead of restructuring question time in a manner that could reduce the accountability of ministers to the Senate ...

How on earth could having a question on the Notice Paper reduce the accountability of ministers in the Senate? In fact, it will increase the accountability of ministers in the Senate. And the fact is that we have people from the ministers’ offices and from the departments spending hours of their time every day preparing for possible questions that may never get asked.

I was talking to a former minister in the New South Wales government at lunchtime today who has not been in parliament now for some 10 or 11 years. He said that his staff spent two or three hours every day preparing for question time and he rarely ever got a question. He said it was the most wasted time that could be conceived of for his staff and his department. I do not want to see that waste happen here.

The other proposal is that answers be relevant. That is one of the things that has never been in the standing orders relating to question time. There is relevance applied in other areas of the standing orders but nothing to question time. I am not talking particularly about this government; I am talking about every government that we have had. How many times have we seen media journalists ask the Prime Minister or any minister a question at a press conference and receive a direct answer or at least an answer to their question in a short fashion? I have seen the same questions asked in parliament and we have had 12 minutes of non-answer. The journalists simply would not put up with non-answers to questions and yet, in this place, governments of various persuasions have asked us to put up with non-answers for 10 or 15 minutes. So we cannot even treat our colleagues in this place in the same way that a minister or a Prime Minister would treat a journalist who asked a question at a press conference.

It is important in many ways—and this is my hope in the future—that question time in this place should more resemble the types of questions that we get at estimates where ministers and officials are asked direct questions and give reasonably short answers. If a minister does not want to answer a question in estimates, there are ways and means of getting around it so that question is not answered, but it would not take four, 10 or 12 minutes; it would be done in two minutes. It would still be quite possible for a person not to give a non-answer in question time because they would have to be relevant, but they can get around the question in exactly the same way that ministers do when they are in estimates.

The important thing is to show some reform in this place which makes us more relevant to those people outside the chamber who watch what we are doing. I discussed the purpose of question time with former Senator Robert Ray some six or eight months ago before he left this place. He said, ‘Do up a paper and bring it to the Procedure Committee.’ That was Senator Ray’s reaction because he believed in it and I know that there are some people on the government side who think that there is something that needs to be done about question time. They may not agree with what I have proposed in the discussion paper, but everybody agrees that there needs to be some changes.

In this place and in the other place, as I said once before, we are judged by our behaviour in question time. I have watched question time in other parliaments at length, particularly in Canada, the UK, New Zealand and the Scottish parliament. The Scottish parliament is a new parliament which has derived its question time after looking at the current procedures of all of those other parliaments that have been in place for a long time. The one parliament that they disregarded totally was our parliament because of the nature of our question time. We are the only parliament, to the best of my knowledge, that has questions without notice. The object of the exercise is to try to hold any government accountable for its actions and those actions are held to account by asking direct questions and getting direct answers. Maybe there is a lengthy explanation as to the direct answer, but it can be done.

I cannot see in my own mind why people say, ‘It’s a bit difficult to change; we like the way we do things.’ What we have now to be quite frank is an opposition who ask questions they hope the government cannot answer and we have a government who asks questions of their own ministers where the answers are already prepared. That is the downfall of our question time. If you have questions on notice, a minister has a chance to provide an answer, which is what we should be getting—answers as to the activities of governments and the actions or the non-actions of governments. But by having questions without notice, a minister in real difficulty will say, ‘I’ll take that on notice and come back to you at a later stage.’ Why not give them the notice? Let them prepare the answer and then supplementary questions will arise from the answer to the primary question. You do not have to come in here with prepared supplementary questions. If you get an answer, the supplementary question is automatically generated from the answer.

It will test ministers out and I can tell you it will test oppositions out too. It is just as difficult for oppositions to come up with relevant questions as supplementaries as it is for ministers to continue to provide answers. That is what we are in this place for. There is also the fact that we are putting a short time limit on it. In most other parliaments they do not even have two minutes, in Canada, I think, it is 90 seconds. In New Zealand they have up to 63 or 64 supplementary questions a day. You can have as many as you like on a particular item. In here if we have a themed question time, we ask six questions about the same thing. Why not have one question and ask the six questions all at once rather than toing and froing?

There are so many things, I believe, that will help the processes, the procedures and the outcomes of this place. We might finish up with a public who, instead of thinking that we are a rabble at question time, actually watch question time and get some answers to the questions that they have on their minds as well. That is what this parliament ought to be doing. That is why, Senator Fielding, I brought these proposals to the Procedure Committee. I, together with my staff, have spent six months working on them and that is why I believe that they should be supported. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Senator McLucas) adjourned.