Page 2169 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 28 August 2007
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We made some comments about dorothy dixers. I know that that has happened all the way through estimates. (Second speaking period taken.) Clearly that can be a waste of the committee’s time as well. It deprives other members of the opportunity to ask more in-depth questions. All members need to ask questions. But care needs to be taken to ensure that dorothy dixers do not last far too long. I have already mentioned the introductory statements.
Questions on notice have been mentioned by a few members. These are also very important to public accountability. We see here a practice whereby ministers are starting to split hairs and ignore answering the substantive part of the question. We saw this tendency in this estimates committee. It is a tendency I have started to see over the last 12 months or so in terms of questions on notice.
I give the example of the health minister, who avoided a question asking why waiting times for aged hospital patients were significantly in excess of the government’s target. Her reply consisted of taking issue with the term “significantly”. She never gave any reason for the government’s failure to meet this target or any type of explanation. Presumably the assumption here was that, if you rationalise the differential in the figures into insignificance, the target becomes elastic and close enough is good enough.
Again it was a resort to that sort of mumbo jumbo and an admission of inference that government targets are meaningless and certainly not taken seriously, being more honoured in the breach than in the doing. Again it was unnecessary. It does not do us any good if people go off on semantics rather than try to answer the substance of the question. We recommend that the government make a genuine effort to answer the substance of questions on notice rather than attempt to sidestep them through hairsplitting on the wordings of questions.
Another issue that concerned me in this process—we have referred to it in the report and there was media coverage on it—was that members of the executive were on occasions extremely abusive of interlocutors, including community groups. That behaviour is very unprofessional. Again it makes a mockery of the openness of the government. The Chief Minister and Mr Hargreaves were particularly wont to give questioners in the estimates process a spray for daring to question the government, preferring the “offence is the best means of defence” approach.
One is reminded of the property council—the poor old property council. Like any other community group or peak body it is there to do a job. Its job is to represent the interests of its constituents—just like ACT Shelter, ACTCOSS and the AFPA—just like any other group formed to represent the interests of their members. All of those groups—whether you agree with them or not—have a legitimate point of view.
As a minister I may not agree with many of the community groups I deal with. But I cannot recall in the history of this place various groups such as this being subject to the level of unnecessary abuse by government ministers—not all government ministers, but by some. You need to lift your game. It is quite wrong for the Chief Minister to say that the property council is a mob with almost nil credibility.
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