Page 2066 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 21 June 2011
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MR HARGREAVES (Brindabella) (12.03): It is customary for committee members to thank people at the conclusion of their speeches. I am going to do it at the beginning of mine. I would like to echo the expressions of appreciation from our chair, Mr Smyth—and from Ms Hunter—who has named every single person who had anything to do with the report. I think that is most appropriate; so I am not going to do it. However, I would like to single out the amazing Grace Concannon for the work that she did to knit all of those pieces together.
I have served on estimates committees where they have had the one secretary, and that person has basically been incarcerated with members for a good couple of weeks, tortured to death and been requested and required to put forward a report which can make sense to the common man. They have always been able to do it, but this Assembly has seen common sense in recent years by spreading the load across all of the committee secretaries. I think that is a very good way forward.
I would like to say a big thank you to our chair, Mr Smyth, for the record. I thought that his chairmanship of the hearings themselves was done very well. I thought the number of times where tempers started to get a bit heated, where people were starting to get a bit tetchy, was very much in the minority in my experience in this particular set of hearings, and I have been involved in some. I have been on the receiving end in some. I have been on the dishing-out end in some and I have used it as a tactic in previous years to actually slow the thing down. This time it was hardly ever needed.
I think, with very few exceptions, the hearings were conducted with respect and with restraint. I thank the members of the opposition and the members of the crossbench for their professional approach to those hearings. I think the democratic process is the winner out of all of that, quite frankly.
Now to the report: when looking at this report, I was reminded of another tome “The angler’s art—the estimates committee reports for dummies”. I think this has probably got to be one of the biggest fishing trip exercises that I have seen in a long time. It would do “The traveller’s guide to Pratt’s Tackle Box” an awful amount of credit.
I did some stats on it just for the record. Get this: I found that there were 20 machinery recommendations. These are ones where we might say that we want some consistency across indicators and those sorts of things. There were 20 of those. There were 27 recommendations where we actually called for an action. For example, I think there was one around the Fitters Workshop where we called for an action. There were 27 of those.
You might note, however, that there were 192 recommendations, but 92 of those called for additional information. In respect of getting the government to be a mirror government, always constantly looking into things, there were 51 of those. So if you add those two together, out of 192 recommendations, 143 of them were fishing trips. Seventy-five per cent of the recommendations are actually fishing trips.
That has to be added to the number of questions on notice. Some members were getting tetchy because their questions on notice were not answered. We need to understand that in the context of how many there were. There were, in fact, 894
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