Page 1747 - Week 05 - Thursday, 10 May 2018
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when I came back to discover that the committee had not met. At one stage I got a message to ask if I was prepared to phone in, but it was 2 o’clock in London, and I had had a full day and was about to have another full day, so I declined to phone in to a 2 am meeting.
Ms Cheyne: A quorum is three, not four. Where was the opposition leader?
MRS DUNNE: I am accounting for myself.
Ms Cheyne: You are also the chair. Account for your party.
MADAM SPEAKER: Ms Cheyne.
MRS DUNNE: I am accounting for myself as an individual. As we all know, when we go into a committee, we leave our party affiliations at the door. That is what we are supposed to do. I am accounting for myself, Madam Speaker, and answering Mr Steel’s questions.
There are a number of submissions, in excess of 20 submissions that I have seen, that have not yet been authorised for publication. Some of them have come from the have your say website; some of them have not. I do not know what the committee will do with those submissions, simply because there is also a privileges inquiry underway. It would be remiss of me to venture any further into those issues.
Suffice it to say that this has become a complicated issue. As I said at the outset, and there has been discussion from time to time in the committee, the reporting date of the end of May was always ambitious. There was a recognition of that and it has been made much more complex by a privileges inquiry. There is also increasing difficulty in having more hearings of the committee through the committee process in May, because at the moment the health committee is meeting on Tuesdays and this Friday; the JACS committee is meeting, I think, on Tuesdays; and the end of life committee is meeting basically from nine to five on Thursday and Friday all through May and into the beginning of June.
Quite frankly, as I said to Ms Cody this morning, I do not have the mental resources to conduct another inquiry whilst being involved in two other quite difficult inquiries and do it justice. I have been very keen not to have PAC hearings that coincide with the very busy committee schedule that is already in place for May. That was one of the reasons. Therefore it means that probably the first time we can seriously schedule hearings for this inquiry is after the hearings of the estimates committee, which means that it will be at the end of June and into July.
Ms Cody suggested an earlier reporting date. I said that the risk is that we might fail to meet that reporting date, and that it would be better to under-promise and over-deliver than to have to come back into the Assembly and adjust the reporting date again. With all of that in mind, I commend the motion to adjust the reporting date from the last sitting day in May to the last sitting day in September.
Question resolved in the affirmative.
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