Page 4396 - Week 14 - Thursday, 28 November 2013
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If you take that second line, it kind of suggests that it comes after it has been submitted. I have taken that second line out and put it back into my proposed new standing order 247 to make it clear that, yes, they prepare the draft and then they circulate it before the meeting.
Proposed standing order 248 is quite simple. It states:
At a meeting convened for the purpose, the Chair shall submit the draft report which may be considered at once.
Standing order 249 states that that might happen unless some other member brings on an alternative report. Then the committee’s first job is to decide which report it shall do. Standing order 249A is part of what Dr Bourke had said; so it seems reasonable. That is just the way we have already done it.
Dr Bourke’s motion states that reports may be considered “paragraph by paragraph or, by leave, paragraphs may be considered together”. Under that you can consider all the paragraphs together; so you can still do the whole report in one lump if you choose or you can do it line by line. But most committees, in my experience, have worked out a path forward, agreed to a path forward and off they have gone. Standing order 250 is the existing standing order 250. It states:
After the draft report has been considered, the whole or any paragraph may be reconsidered and amended.
Something might happen later on in a report that causes you to question what you have said earlier; so you come back and you might have to amend it. Then we have the Mick Gentleman memorial standing order 250A, which has been the standard practice in this place as far as I have been able to check back right from day one. At the end of the hearing, when all is said and done, the chair says, “I move that the report, as amended, be agreed to.” So that is just to confirm that that actually happens. Apparently that has not been happening in some of the committees, and that is a shame.
Proposed standing order 250B is interesting. It relates to when committees are unable to agree on a report. We currently do not have anything in this regard. Because of the government’s attempts to nobble the committee system, we are now getting two-two votes. What this says is that if the committee is unable to agree upon a report, the chair of the committee must present a statement to that effect with just the minutes and transcripts of evidence.
That is basically lifted from the House of Representatives Practice, except that in House of Representatives Practice it makes reference to “a report” instead of “a statement”. The reason I changed it to “statement” is this: if it is a report, members are able to dissent from it. I do not see how you can dissent from the fact that you cannot agree and then try to put in a dissenting report which, in one case, was the chair’s original draft. Apart from issues of plagiarism and perhaps theft that somebody takes a report that is put forward by the committee and—
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