Page 1120 - Week 03 - Thursday, 22 March 2012
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table all of your questions, as printed, before you ask them. Questions without notice will now just be questions that are given to the government before the questions are even asked.
If you read this, you will see that it says that we table all emails and documents relating to question time today. Does that include all the emails between members of staff? Does it include all the emails between the MLAs as they worked out what questions were being asked today? Does it include all the FOI documents that we might have drawn upon to table today? If there is an FOI then the staff can start preparing the FOI, all the supporting documents, all the emails between members, all the printed questions that we have—because that is covered here. The Chief Minister wants us to table all of the documents relating to question time today before question time is over.
This is a ridiculous motion. This motion undermines the notion of questions without notice because the Chief Minister is not able to cope. This motion should not be supported today, because what it does is set a precedent that question time will simply become a mockery. What it means is that democracy, the new era of openness and accountability—according to Katy Gallagher, you have to put all your cards on the table before we start the game. That is how the Chief Minister wants to play—
Members interjecting—
MR SMYTH: Why don’t we amend this—that all members—
Members interjecting—
MR SPEAKER: Order! Members, I am hearing some rather unparliamentary interjections across the chamber. Let us just lift the standard, thank you.
MR SMYTH: Perhaps we should amend it so that all members table all emails and documents relating to question time today. If the Chief Minister wants to accept this standard, they can now table their dixers and the speeches that the ministers have—and all the emails between their offices and the officials in the departments. We will then get the rough drafts of all of the cheat sheets that have been put together. We will then, in this new era of openness and accountability that the Chief Minister seeks to enforce, get all of the documents from the government for their two questions and all the documents they have in front of them relating to question time today.
The Greens will be forced to do the same. So all of your emails, emails between yourselves and between your staff, all of the questions that you have got written down there ready to ask, will be put on the table before we start.
This is not how question time works. It is a poorly considered motion from a Chief Minister who does not understand parliamentary practice, who is scrabbling to answer questions that she clearly has no grasp of. The motion should be defeated.
MS BRESNAN (Brindabella) (2.26): The Greens will not support this motion as it stands. We would be willing to support it if it was amended to say that it specifically
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