Page 3327 - Week 11 - Tuesday, 12 October 1993
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MR KAINE: No, both sides of the house. Then members start trying to acquire that additional information that is not part of the budget papers. There is a lot of it. I am sure that the Ministers sitting opposite must have a fairly good idea of the magnitude of the additional information that is being sought now through the processes of the Estimates Committee.
Mr Wood: That you probably will not use.
MR KAINE: We do use it, Minister.
Mr Wood: Mr Humphries says that it is a fishing expedition.
MR KAINE: Perhaps some of us use it better than others. The fact is that the budget papers do not provide all of the information that one really needs in order to pursue a matter in detail with a particular Minister. Once the budget is on the table we start this process of trying to acquire more and more information. I think even the members of the Executive would argue that you would have a better debate in the Estimates Committee if the non-government members were better informed than they have been in the past.
The process is improving. Some of us have been around here for a quite long time. The Chief Minister and I have been here since Methuselah was a pup. Back when Methuselah was a pup the amount of information that we had available to us during the Estimates Committee process was minimal. That was for a number of reasons. One was that we had not yet begun to appreciate that there was a lot more information there that was available for the asking. A lot of it is not available for the asking, but I am sure that there is a lot of information that is still there that would add to the quality of what happens in the Estimates Committee.
Of course, to some degree the additional information that you get when you go out and deliberately seek it can effectively reduce or change the kind of questioning that goes on in the committee process, because if you already have the information you do not need to elicit it from a Minister or senior official. I am not suggesting that you would necessarily lengthen the time taken by the Estimates Committee process. What you would be doing is lengthening the period from the time the budget is brought down until the Estimates Committee process begins, to allow a more comprehensive information gathering exercise, so that members can be better informed and they can identify, perhaps better, the areas that they wish to develop in greater depth with the Ministers and the officials when they are before the committee. I believe that it would add to the quality of the Estimates Committee process.
I know that it might also make it more difficult for Ministers. There is no question that the more information you have the more difficult you can make the life of a Minister when he or she comes before the Estimates Committee; but I think that that is the essence of the Estimates Committee. Our job is to make life difficult for the Ministers. As I said before, this is really the one time during the annual cycle when an individual member of the Assembly can make a Minister accountable for something directly, because we are sitting on one side of the Estimates Committee desk and the Minister is sitting on the other side. We have an opportunity totally different from question time. We can ask questions and elicit information and try to find out just what the rationale is behind government decisions, and the magnitude of the consequences.
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