Page 4400 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 19 November 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
secretary, Ms Karin Malmberg. I would like personally to thank them all for their efforts in assisting us to produce the reports that you have here today. We all know the time constraints that the staff work under in these final months of this Assembly. The work that they have done is a credit to them.
Mr Speaker, the Estimates Committee is required to consider and examine a considerable amount of information. It is the role of the committee staff to ensure that this information is available to members in sufficient time for us to prepare for the long periods of public hearings. It is unfortunate, Mr Speaker, that some Ministers do not appear to consider the provision of information requested by the committee important. It often took weeks for this information to be provided to members of the committee.
Because of the budget timetable, it is important for us to have as much information as possible before the public hearing or at least on the day of the hearing. This allows members to complete their line of questioning and get to the meat of the problem being examined. Failure to provide this information until the day before the reporting date, as was noted in the report about information provided by the Chief Minister's Department - the department that has a section responsible for the overall management of the public service - was a most unfortunate state of affairs. That is why the committee has chosen to make very strong comments about this factor in the report.
In one other case, Mr Speaker, the committee received a response from the Minister for Urban Services in reply to a formal letter of 16 October following up a request for information. This letter was dated 14 November. I know that some information was provided to the committee initially, but it was a holding reply. The final reply was not provided until 14 days after the committee had reported and effectively been dissolved.
That, Mr Speaker, is another problem that was faced by this committee. It is a problem that I expect the next Estimates Committee will not have to put up with. I trust that they will receive a much better response than we did. It was for this reason, as I have already said, that we made some strong comments on the problem. The clear recommendation made by the committee was the need for five working days response time after the question had been asked. It is my view, Mr Speaker, that we should never get to the stage where the last part of that recommendation needs to be implemented, that is, five days before the committee is required to produce its report.
I trust that Ministers and their staffs will ensure that questions are answered promptly so that the committee can get on with the job. This will enable the committee to consider the responses in sufficient time to allow a decision to be made on whether to recall a Minister and his or her advisers. I put it to the Assembly and the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .