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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 12 Hansard (18 November) . . Page.. 4232 ..

MR HARGREAVES (continuing):

matter of the question and not be debated. The Speaker may also direct a member to terminate an answer if in his or her opinion a member is contravening the provisions stated above or the member has had sufficient opportunity to answer the question.

In the course of this inquiry, a survey was done of other parliaments. For the record, I would like to run through some of the jurisdictions. Obviously, in the ACT Legislative Assembly, under standing order 113A, the rules are that questions without notice shall not be concluded until all non-executive members rising have asked at least one question. In the House of Representatives there is no time limit but there is a convention that no more than 20 questions per sitting be asked. In the Senate the limits are four minutes for an answer to a question and one minute for an answer to a supplementary question.

In New South Wales there is no time limit but no questions shall be asked after 45 minutes from the Speaker calling on questions or the answering of 10 questions, whichever is the later. In the Legislative Council of New South Wales, the time limit is four minutes for an answer and two minutes for a supplementary. In the Northern Territory there is no time limit-but you would expect that in the Northern Territory. In the Queensland Legislative Assembly the time limit is three minutes and the total period allowed each day for the asking of questions without notice shall not exceed one hour.

In South Australia no time limit is specified but, again, unless otherwise ordered, the period for asking questions may not exceed an hour. In the Legislative Council there is no time limit but, again, unless otherwise ordered, the period for asking questions without notice may not exceed an hour.

I will not go into all of the rest of them but I draw members' attention to page 6, which details the comparisons. I will, however, say that our electoral system in terms of size has commonality with Tasmania and the Northern Territory. In the Tasmanian House of Assembly no time limit is specified but no questions shall be asked after the lapse of an hour; in other words, it is an hour long. Members can have a look at those at their leisure.

On page 10 of the report there is a summary of the Fifth Assembly so far. We've had 785 questions without notice and 636 supplementaries. The average number of questions without notice per sitting day is 10.9. The average number of supplementary questions is 8.8-and I thank the 0.9 of a member and the 0.8 of a member who have been so good as to make it an odd number! The total time for question time in 2003 is 26 hours and 32 minutes. So the average length of question time has been 53 minutes. Interestingly, that is not far under the hour that a lot of jurisdictions allow for questions to be asked. The average length of a question and answer is two minutes and 44 seconds. I think a lot of that can be attributed to Mr Wood, who is quite brief in his responses.

I will just go through a few of the committee's considerations. The committee considered the limitations in the other houses and agreed that a time limit on individual questions could be warranted but they would not support a time limit on the question time session. In other words, we do not support a limit of, say, one hour. We also felt that imposing an upper limit of five minutes for the giving of an answer to a question without notice reconfirms the intention of the standing orders that things be concise and brief. The recommendation, as members will see on page 14, is:

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