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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (27 February) . . Page.. 341 ..

Mr Humphries: You have not done that; you have done something different. What I assume Ms Follett is moving under is paragraph (c) of standing order 118A, which says:

in the event that the Minister does not provide an explanation, the Member may, without notice, move a motion with regard to the Minister's failure to provide either an answer or an explanation.

The Chief Minister has not supplied an answer, but she has supplied an explanation. She has explained why it is not possible to have produced an answer at this stage. I would have said that was a quite reasonable explanation. Ms Follett does not agree with that. It does not say, however, that it must be a satisfactory explanation or a reasonable explanation in the eye of the asker of that question. It simply says "provide an explanation". Mrs Carnell has done that, and therefore there is no capacity under standing order 118A to move this motion.

Ms Follett: If I may speak to the point of order, Mr Speaker, I direct your attention to the earlier part of standing order 118A, where it refers to the answering of a question within that period:

provide to the Member who asked the question an explanation satisfactory to that Member of why an answer has not yet been provided ...

I repeat what I said in moving the motion: The explanation given to me is not satisfactory. Mrs Carnell has had three months to answer the question, and the fact that it is a complex question, in my view, does not mean that you get out of answering it. Mrs Carnell ought to have answered this question by 5 January. That was when the answer was due, under our own standing orders. I believe that I have been more than tolerant in allowing such a long period to elapse since the answer was due - 5 January - before raising the matter again. I raised it last week. It is not as if Mrs Carnell was unaware that I wanted an answer to the question. Again, the only response I got was, "Oh well, it is a complex question". It is a long way from being the most complex question. I know what it involves and I know that it requires you to go to all of the departments.

Mr Humphries: Is this a point of order you are making?

Ms Follett: I repeat, under the point of order, that there is a clear role in standing order 118A for the member to be satisfied with the explanation. I am not satisfied; hence I am proceeding down this path, and I believe that it is totally in order.

Mr Humphries: Mr Speaker, on that point of order: Ms Follett refers to the wording of paragraph (c). It is interesting that the wording of paragraph (c) is different from the wording of the preamble to those three paragraphs. That refers to "an explanation satisfactory to that Member". I will quote the whole phrase:

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