Page 2232 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 1 August 2017
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As you would expect, a number of questions were unable to be asked during the hearings and were put on notice. As the chair of the committee I received a letter where the minister unilaterally decided that only 32, or various parts of them, of the 325 questions she received on notice related to the health portfolio and she requested an increase in the time frame allowed for answering those questions on notice so that the committee could meet its 1 August deadline. She also noted in her letter that she had instructed ACT Health to prepare responses only to those questions that could reasonably be assumed to be part of the budget papers and/or related discussions at the hearings. It very disturbing that members of the executive feel they can unilaterally rule in or out questions that members of the Assembly put in on notice as part of the scrutiny process. That underlines a very concerning culture emerging within the executive.
Tabled today with the report is a schedule of unanswered questions that were taken on notice. I draw members’ attention to the fact that the final version of the report shows that 28 questions were unanswered at the time of the committee report being agreed upon. The schedule provided today only outlines 10 questions that remain outstanding, as a number of the questions on notice came in after the committee had agreed on its report. This, too, adds greater complexity to the committee’s ability to deliberate over a report. If a substantial number of questions on notice have not been answered within the time frames agreed and required, they cannot form part of the deliberation or the consideration of the report as it is prepared. That goes quite some way to making the committee’s role of scrutinising the functions of government and the budget process much more difficult. I conclude my remarks there and look forward to the opportunity to speak further in the appropriation debate next week.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (11.22): I also start by thanking the committee secretary, Nicola Kosseck, plus the army of other secretaries who helped us in this task. I think that it was a particularly well-run estimates process this time. We ended up with 158 recommendations, which is not a record. You will be very pleased to know that I do not intend to speak on them all. However, I will speak on some of them.
I cannot resist starting where Mr Wall also started, which is recommendations 3 and 4. They go to the conduct of the committee hearings and, you could say, at some times the excessively boring repetitiveness of answers that were given to questions. I think there was an awful lot to get through; there were an awful lot of committee members. As Mr Wall mentioned, there are a lot of non-committee members who were interested in various parts of the estimates. I think it really would be useful to try to be succinct and not to be repetitious. It is really great to have a chance to have a conversation with the people that are actually doing things. That is the beauty and the plus of estimates. I would like to see that continue, rather than, at times, our just going over and over the same things.
Moving right along, recommendations 18, 19 and 20 in fact deal with what we are talking about this afternoon: democracy, consultation, how we get deliberative democracy. I am very pleased that the budget has money—about $2.8 million—set aside for that.
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