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Legislative Council - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-05-06 Daily Xml
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PARLIAMENTARY SITTINGS

The Hon. R.L. BROKENSHIRE (16:47): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Leader of the Government a question on the subject of the latest attack on democracy in South Australia.

Leave granted.

The Hon. R.L. BROKENSHIRE: Like other colleagues, I am glad to be back in this place and look forward to continuing in the tradition of parliamentary democracy and oversight of the government of the day in the Legislative Council. As honourable members from the previous parliament would know, many of us would prefer that we did not have a 150 day holiday from sitting. For the benefit of new members, the previous Legislative Council passed a bill to recall parliament for two weeks last February prior to the election in March, a bill that was not supported by the government on the numbers in the lower house.

During the past 27 years of previous Labor and Liberal governments, and the current government, parliament has sat, on average, for 53 sitting days per annum. I was therefore surprised when I received my sitting calendar, issued by the Minister for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure on 16 April 2010, which when you count up the days sees us sitting for only 36 days this year, with the other place sitting 35 days, plus five days of estimates—18 days short of the average of 53 set over the past 30 years. My questions to the leader are:

1. Is this a return to the Labor tradition of droughts of sitting days, as we saw before and after the 1985 and 1989 state elections?

2 In light of the lack of sitting days this year, will the government be more sympathetic to the establishing of Legislative Council select committees, given the lack of opportunities for parliamentary oversight within this chamber and the other place?

3. Will the government allow an expanded Budget and Finance Committee process so that we have a continuous estimates process, as occurs in Canberra, so as to free up the scheduled estimates sitting days for regular sittings of parliament?

4. Why does the government, in this council, follow the lead of the other place in setting the number of sitting days for the Legislative Council without any consultation with crossbench members, who now occupy one-third of the seats in this chamber?

The Hon. P. HOLLOWAY (Minister for Mineral Resources Development, Minister for Urban Development and Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister Assisting the Premier in Public Sector Management) (16:49): The honourable member says that the cross-bench members comprise a third of the seats. I remind him that the Australian Labor Party is the largest group in this parliament with eight members. If one looks at the Liberal and Labor vote combined in the upper house at the last election, it was a little bit short of 80 per cent. I think one needs to bear that in mind. It is often said that this council reflects more accurately than the house what is happening in the electorate. I am not sure that is any longer the case if one looks at the recent election.

The honourable member was, of course, a minister in the previous Liberal government from 1993 to 2002. The advice I have is that this government had 26 more days of parliamentary sitting in the eight years of government we have just had than in the last eight years of the previous Liberal government—478 days compared with 452. Having said that, it is inevitable in election years—

Members interjecting:

The PRESIDENT: Order! Honourable members will cop their flogging in silence.

The Hon. P. HOLLOWAY: It is inevitable in election years, as we are now—the government would have liked the parliament to have resumed a little earlier after the election but, clearly, there are statutory times. Perhaps there is a problem with having elections in March. It has never been the case that parliament has sat during January. If one goes back 150 years, it only ever happened once or twice in emergency situations. That has not been the tradition.

If there is an issue, ultimately, something can be looked at. Clearly, we have now had the election and parliament has resumed in the shortest possible time it could, given everything that had to be taken into account after the election. We are now at a stage where nearly half of the year has gone so, of course, we are not going to have as many sitting days in the remainder of this year as we normally would have in a whole year.

I defy anyone to explain how having had an extra couple of weeks earlier in this sitting would, in any way, have added to democracy in this state or the proper scrutiny of the government. We all know that if we had had two weeks just prior to an election it would have been a complete and utter circus in here. Everyone knows that.

As for the future, what I think is important is that we do use the time in this place better, and I am certainly open to any suggestions from honourable members as to how to do that. I have had some discussions with members. One of the things we can do to add to our sitting time is to have some more rational hours—for example, there appears to be no reason why we should not resume after the dinner break at perhaps 7.30 rather than 7.45 and we can look at other changes. Hopefully, when question time ends in a few minutes, we will establish a standing orders committee which can look at such issues. When we resume next week I hope to bring some proposals about ways we can improve the operation of this parliament in relation to sitting hours.

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