Page 599 - Week 02 - Thursday, 20 March 2014
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
improve things rather than dumbing them down and moving to the default nature that we seem to be doing—that made the committee system in this place for a very long time the jewel in the crown.
I object to the notion put forward by Mr Gentleman that committees of four members are somehow normal and have always occurred. They have not. I have not got the list with me, but I read it out last time when we had this debate. The advice from the secretariat was that they were in fact quite rare. They were normally to accommodate somebody like Mrs Helen Cross, who moved to the crossbench. They are in fact a rarity.
When we go to proposed new standing order 250B, it says:
If the committee is unable to agree upon a report, the Chair of the committee must present a written statement to that effect, along with the minutes of the proceedings.
Mr Gentleman said that this is a move away from the House of Reps practice. It is a small step, but it is just to clarify. It is entirely consistent with the sentiment of the House of Reps. House of Representatives Practice says:
If a committee is unable to agree upon a report, it may present a special report to that effect, with its minutes and the transcript of evidence.
The reason that I changed the word “report”, or took the term “special report” and made it “statement”, was that Mr Gentleman used the dissenting power of a report to then table something. He said, “Here is my dissenting report,” when in fact it was a chair’s draft that the committee had not agreed on. It is to stop that sort of gaming that I have changed the words “report” or “special report” to “statement”. You will still get the statement, you will get the minutes and you will get the transcript of evidence—entirely consistent with what House of Representatives Practice currently lays out. But it will not allow somebody to game the decision.
Let us face it: if you cannot agree on a report, it is hard to dissent. It is hard logically to dissent from something that does not exist. We need to go back and fix the problem. In the interim, the amendment to the standing orders will help smooth some of the process, but at the end of the day that is what will happen as long as you have two and two.
Well done to the Labor members for defending their government. That is their job. We accept that. That is not the way it used to be on committees. Committees used to work far more collaboratively to actually benefit the community instead of protecting the government. They are here, consistent with the Latimer House principles. In the continuing resolution, we all signed up that we believe in Latimer House. Latimer House quite clearly says that you need a strong and effective committee system to monitor the government. You do not have that by having the system balanced in such a way that the government members can do that because of the standing order that Dr Bourke put in. Again, I go back to that day when the agreement of admin and procedures was that both Dr Bourke’s suggested amendment and my amendment would go to admin and procedures. The government and the Greens on the day
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video