Parliamentary Procedure

Parliamentary Workplace Reports

The SPEAKER (14:16): Before we move to questions, I just wanted to touch on the past sitting week, when I tabled two reports into the workplace that is our parliament. The first report was a report by the new Executive Officer of the Joint Parliamentary Service, as required under section 9 of the Statutes Amendment (Parliament—Executive Officer and Clerks) Act 2024. That section provides:

(1) The Executive Officer must, not later than 10 months after the relevant day, provide to the President of the Legislative Council and the Speaker of the House of Assembly a report that includes an assessment of the way in which the workplace of the joint parliamentary service is managed…

The report and assessment considered the Joint Parliamentary Service workplaces only, which include the following business areas: Parliamentary Reporting Division, which is Hansard; parliamentary library division; the catering division; and joint services division—Finance, People and Culture, Parliamentary Network Support Group and Building Services. The houses were not included in the workplace assessment, although people from each of the houses were invited to provide input into the report.

A significant challenge until now has been that, for many decades, the responsibilities and accountability for the Joint Parliamentary Service has alternated between the Clerks of the respective houses on top of their house duties, and it has been a big workload and an increasing workload, and added responsibilities. It is quite an interesting time to be in here. We actually have three former Speakers, as well as the Speaker—I do not think that would have happened too many times over the years—and I want to thank the leader, the deputy leader and the member for Kavel for the work that they have put in over the past eight years in trying to modernise and make this a more contemporary workplace. There was also another report, which was based on the Equal Opportunity Commissioner's report to parliament back in 2021.

So there has been a lot of work done, but we still have to do more work and we have to modernise an act that goes back to 1985, and that was based on an act from 1945. So a lot has happened in the 80 years since then, and that has been recognised by the Joint Parliamentary Service Committee, which is made up of the presiding officers and the whips of each house. We are going to be sitting in January, February and March to continue to work on what those changes might look like so that, when we are back here with the new parliament after 21 March, we can present that new government, and members of parliament, with a blueprint of things that we can work on.

We know this is a workplace with three different workplaces within it. We know there was an EB process that dragged on for 20 months that caused some friction in the house. We need to repair those bridges, mend those bridges and repair the relationships. I think it is really important that we do that and that we all work together. I just ask all of the people who are on the Joint Parliamentary Service Committee that, even though people are going to be busy in the lead-up to the election on 21 March, we can all attend those meetings so that we have a quorum and we can get on with the job of making this an even better place for people to come to work.