DEBATES – Tuesday 6 February 2018
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DEBATES – Tuesday 6 February 2018 Madam Speaker took the Chair at 11 am. Madam SPEAKER: Honourable Members, I have received message 10 from her honour, the Administrator, notifying assent to the bills passed at the November 2017 sittings. The message is dated 16 January 2018. PAPER TABLED Estimates Committee Report Ms AH KIT (Karama): Madam Speaker, I table the Estimates Committee Report on Agency, Annual Report Hearings and the associated minutes of proceedings. This report was sent to you and made public under Standing Order 200 on 1 December 2017. MOTION Note Paper– Estimates Committee Report Ms AH KIT (Karama): The Michael Gunner Labor government gave a commitment to open parliament to the people in order to engage more effectively with Territorians regarding our parliamentary processes. Amending the estimates process in 2017 saw a trial run of the splitting of estimates hearings into two separate hearings that were held in June 2017 and November 2017. Estimates hearings provided an opportunity to scrutinise expenditure and performance by agencies and it was great to have the Member for Nhulunbuy join government members for both the June and November hearings to participate in the scrutiny. It was also great to have the Independent members for Blain, Araluen and Nelson participate in the scrutiny process during the November estimates hearing. I thank all ministers for their participation in these hearings and send a huge thank you to government agencies for all their hard work in preparation for both hearings. I acknowledge and thank the hard-working staff within the parliamentary committees unit for your assistance to the Estimates Committee and send my final thanks to all members of the Estimates Committee who participated in the estimates process for 2017. I trust that you all found value in these hearings and I look forward to receiving your feedback on this new process. It is important that we as parliamentarians review the processes we have in place in order to improve the way we work so that we can maximise our effectiveness for greater benefit to Territorians. I move that the report be noted. Mr WOOD (Nelson): I want to comment on the Estimates Committee process again. I understand what the member has said in that we should look at ways to improve how we do our business in this parliament. It is important we retain that whole concept of being open and transparent, especially when it comes to government business. I did not attend the first sitting of the Estimates Committee because I believe that, to some extent, people on this side were being railroaded into a process which they did not support—even from the point of view of being micromanaged when they were basically told what hours they would operate in discussions with ministers. My concern is that we have come away from the essence of what the Estimates Committee is all about. The estimates committee is meant to scrutinise the budget and when it is fully scrutinised it comes back to parliament to be passed as a bill. That did not happen this year. The government decided to put part of the estimates process to one side and bring it back later in the year to look at annual reports long after the bill had been passed. To me that is not a common sense way of operating. I am not against the annual reports being investigated— I use annual reports and have so for years, selectively, not all annual reports, because there are lots of annual reports. I have used the annual reports during the estimates process to raise issues that needed to be raised in scrutinising the budget. By doing it later in the year, you have an opportunity to look at the new annual reports for a department, but the point is, that that is not the role of the Estimates Committee simply because it has finished its operations when the bill has been passed in this House. DEBATES – Tuesday 6 February 2018 I would be supportive of the parliamentary accounts committee being the body which looks at the annual reports. That makes perfectly good sense, because the parliamentary accounts committee’s job is to scrutinise government the whole year around—to look at various projects, where it has spent its money et cetera—and it can selectively pick a particular annual report or part of that annual report and do an investigation. That is exactly what the PAC has done in the past. Whether it is the Attorney–General’s annual report or other issues that have risen from annual reports, or even if it has not come from annual reports— the parliamentary accounts committee as it is at the moment where it can basically set its own agenda, subject to the majority of people on that PAC supporting that move—it can thoroughly investigate matters that have come from departmental annual reports. I think that is the simplest way to do it. It allows the annual reports to be scrutinised. I do not think it makes a lot of sense to try to jam in a relatively short period of time, theoretically, all the annual reports. There is an enormous amount of annual reports, there are little ones and big ones. Sometimes it is even difficult when government departments get amalgamated, and if you have tried to find your way through the website that we have to work our way through, it is very difficult even finding if there are any annual reports. I have had to type in annual report—I have not been able, in many cases on websites, find—as it used to be a list of annual reports year by year. Some websites have it; others have not. That in itself needs an improvement. I do not know whether the Department of Education is better than anyone else but ... Member interjecting: No, it is not. CLP spent all the money upgrading the websites. Mr WOOD: I agree. I think the change in the websites has made it very difficult for people to navigate and it has become less transparent since those changes. I am not asking the government to spend a lot of money to reverse that but maybe there is a set of instructions at the beginning of each website on how to navigate through the website. The point is, it is important that we have annual reports and it is important that there has been a move to emphasise the importance of those annual reports through this parliament. I would say that most of the time that I have been in parliament that generally annual reports were not looked at very much at all. Maybe people would read them, maybe some of the people in the department might read them but how often were they actually looked at in depth. I think that is one of the changes that has been good is that there has been a move to emphasise the importance of annual reports and the importance for members of parliament, especially, to look at those annual reports to find out not only what governments have spent but to find out what programs have happened over the last year, to compare annual reports with annual reports. One of the areas I followed from the day I came in here was literacy and numeracy in remote and very remote communities, and sometimes it is a bit of a wakeup call when you have a look way back and you have a look now, and you say we still have a problem. That is the advantage of annual reports. It gives you the ability to look at how departments are operating, to compare those from year to year and be able to ask questions in parliament during the normal process. If there is a good thing that has happened, it is the emphasis on annual reports, but I do not think the way we did it this year was the way we should do it. I think we should leave that up to the PAC and I prefer to go back to the old—not using old because I believe it is an old-fashioned method. I think it is a method that we worked through—and you have to remember Labor were the ones that introduced the Estimates Committee. They introduced the parliamentary accounts committee. I was on the committee that went to Tasmania originally with a bipartisan group with members of parliament. We developed that in time with the hours we would spend, how we would operate and I think we came up with a good process for looking at the budget. And that is why I was disappointed that, all of a sudden it had been changed, where we cut the budget time down and threw the rest out with annual reports. My suggestion is we go back to what we were before and I am happy to—if there is room to move and room to improve, I am not going to get in the road of that. But I do not think the changes we had helped and I would leave the investigation or the scrutinising of annual reports up to the PAC where I think you can get a better, more selective approach of which parliamentary reports are worth looking at. And it means that those particular reports can be scrutinised at more depth, than trying to jam a whole lot of annual reports into a relatively short space of time. Ms FYLES (Attorney-General): Thank you Madam Speaker and I would like to take a moment to thank all the committee members, particularly the chair, the Member for Karama.