Page 598 - Week 02 - Thursday, 20 March 2014
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Mr Corbell interjecting—
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Ms Lawder): Thank you, Mr Corbell.
Mr Corbell interjecting—
MADAM ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Thank you. We have listened to everyone else in silence. Perhaps we could give Mr Smyth the same courtesy.
MR SMYTH: It is interesting that when, for instance, a committee has not agreed to a final report, and it is tabled as the report of the committee, the chair is sent back to the committee to get the committee to validate it because he had not followed the process. There is clearly a problem there. You can have your head in the sand, but there is a problem there. And there is clearly a problem when, for instance, in a four-member estimates committee, one of the Labor members has to abstain so that the report can go ahead—even though he was clearly against the bulk of the content of the report and lobbed in some 500 recommendations, all of which were duplicates, in order to appear to be doing the job.
The very fact that we are having to change the standing orders would indicate that there is a problem. Once you start to codify things, it is because it is not working. You do not do this for fun.
The first recommendation is that standing order 249 includes the words:
If the committee cannot agree on which draft report to consider the Chair’s draft will have precedence.
That shows that two and two is causing problems. I have been on committees for a long time now; I have appeared before committees. This problem arises because of the way the committees have been made up. This is an amendment that suits the government, because it lets something happen so that you at least get the look that things are moving on. I personally do not believe that is right, but I accept the committee and I will accept the will of the Assembly. If you cannot agree on the fundamental nature of the report, what you get is default reports. They are dumbed-down reports because of this.
What we will get is more and more reports that make bland recommendations or are just a stream of consciousness reporting of what happened in the committee. It will be: “The committee said this.” “The committee asked that.” “The committee did this.” “The minister said this.” “The minister did that.” That is not helping us. When I got to this place in 1998, I remember Harold Hird, Kerrie Tucker and a third member whose name I forget came and said, “Here is a report from the last Assembly that wasn’t binding on the new Assembly that we think you should look at, because this is what the three of us worked together to make happen.” It was a report about lighting, and it was a good report. There was that bipartisan or tripartisan nature of committees—where people really did try to come up with encouragement and suggestions to
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