South Australian Employment Tribunal

Mr GARDNER (Morialta) (15:53): Well, the supplementary question is: is the minister intending to respond to my constituent's letter of September, especially given that I wrote to the Attorney-General a week ago advising him that if he didn't I would be bringing it up in parliament this week and, in particular, as my constituent is waiting on a new set of hearing aids?

The SPEAKER: Point of order.

The Hon. J.M. RANKINE: This contravenes standing order 97.

The SPEAKER: The member for Morialta is on two warnings and, unusually, I agree with the member for Wright: that was an impromptu speech.

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Justice Reform, Minister for Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Child Protection Reform, Minister for the Public Sector, Minister for Consumer and Business Services, Minister for the City of Adelaide) (15:53): Mr Speaker, can I respond to that?

The SPEAKER: Well, it wasn't a question, so I don't see how you can respond to it.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: I have an opportunity, Mr Speaker, and it would be a shame to waste the opportunity. Can I say that one of the things that I have discovered, and I know some of my colleagues have discovered this over time, is that you can be sitting in your office, busily getting on with your business, and then the phone rings and somebody rushes up to you and says, 'A member of the media wants to know what you are going to do about X.' You say, 'Well, I don't know anything about X. Nobody has put that to me,' and then you look at the inquiry and you discover that Mr X has written to you about this and you haven't yet responded. At the moment, the telex machine, or whatever they call them now, in your office starts burbling, and—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Are you sure it's not the Morse code?

The Hon. J.R. RAU: The stuff is coming out of the Gestetner as you're on the phone and you realise that the question is actually being put to you nanoseconds before the request to answer it has been received. In the particular chronology you were just given, that is not the case. Apparently a letter was put in the letterbox about a week ago. I have to say—

Mr Gardner: You got a letter a month ago. I wrote to you a week ago by email; it gets to you immediately these days.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: I do receive a number of letters addressed to me. They don't all reach me within a few days. I do, however, have a standing direction to my staff to say, 'If a member of parliament writes to me in particular, I would like to receive that letter as soon as possible.' I will inquire as to when the letter from the member for Morialta was received in the office, and if it has been sitting around in someone's in-tray for a week or so, I will speak to them and say—in fact, I will tell you, Mr Speaker, what I will say to them.

I will say, 'Look, we should be more punctual with letters from members of parliament because they are important letters, and I would like to read any letter that a member of parliament sends to me so I can respond to it quickly because that's very important.' So I will make inquiries as to where that letter might have gone. But, in the general course, what happens is that every letter that comes into my office—and you would know, Mr Speaker; you occupied the same office—is dealt with by correspondence people. They seek to obtain answers to the letters as soon as possible, and then they send it to the minister.

Sometimes, there is an interval of some time—unacceptable though it is sometimes, that interval can be a long time. When it is a long time, it is very upsetting for the minister because it makes the minister look bad, but that is the way correspondence goes.

The SPEAKER: I think we have the thrust of it. The member for Schubert.