M.P.s’ questions deluge departments

Press, 13 July 1981, Page 16

M.P.s’ questions deluge departments

By

BRIAR WHITEHEAD

One of the fastest and most effective ways the Opposition has of finding out exactly what it wants to know about the activities of the Government. is to ask questions in the House. Question time on a sitting day lasts 40 minutes and allows Opposition and Government M.P.s equally to scrutinise the actions of Ministers, and the Government, and to bring each to account. The procedure was instituted in the 1890 s and considerablytidied up in 1962, when impromptu oral questions and answers were disallowed. Probably as a measure of its success as a quick method of extracting information from the bureaucracy, questions asked in the House have risen from 661 in 1963 to 4945 in 1980. The main increase has been in the number of written questionns placed on the House’s order paper.

Members of Parliament might find the system a boon, but departmental officials do not. What they regard as more essential work is simply not getting done promptly. “We’re running round in tight little circles up here looking after questions that didn’t need to be asked," said a ministerial secretary who spends two days a week attending to questions asked of his Minister. “We wish they’d look up the answers themselves.” A 1977 study by the Minister of Housing and Tourism (Mr Quigley) showed that an average of four hours was spent by many departments on each question, and an average of 34 workers. Complexity of questions has increased since then. A recent series of 16 nearly identical questions took the Department of Labour an estimated 13 man-days to answer. Another needing referral to the Housing Corporation’s Whangarei office virtually de-manned the branch for most of one day recently. Officials protest that it would not be so bad if strict time limits did not have to be observed — three days for

questions answered orally, and five for written answers appearing on the Parliamentary Order Paper. Everything had to be dropped when’a question came in.

Some questions require the checking of thousands of individual dossiers; one question would have needed the checking of 60.000 Housing Corporation files to provide a onesentence answer.

Officials and secretaries feel that the procedure is being over-used, if not abused. On one sitting day last week, 279 questions were waiting for answers. Some Oi the questions have little or no point, officials say. Information could be gained in other ways; M.P.s are simply broadcasting their achievements, or drumming home party policy.

A chief critic is the National M.P. for Hamilton West, Mr M. J. Minogue. Questions in the House should be asked only when alternatives have failed or the matter is so urgent as to require immediate “ventilation” he says. M.P.s who ask questions are “kite-flyers." Questioners rarely need information as urgently as the three-day time limit provides. All his questions had been directed to Ministers as written inquiries. Answers might not have come in three days, but thev came, and fully answered, he said.

The Minister of Housing. Mr Quigley, has asked very few questions in the House, and takes a cost-accountant’s view. “By and large, the material sought can be got by other means, and without tying up staff who are otherwise busy." he says. "The aim of the questions procedure is to elicit information. If the question is not asked for that reason then it can come up as a private member's bill and get two hours of the House’s time, or as a fortnightly debate on notices of motion,” (in which Opposition and Government take it in turn to select any motion for debate) Mr Quigley said.

Numbers of questions asked in the House have leapt ahead of any other indicator of Parliamentary activity. Bills handled each year have remained steady since 1963. and total sitting hours have not increased significantly. The reason, says the Clerk of the House, Mr C. P. Littlejohn, is that M.P.s now have better secretarial and research facilities than they used to. They can dig deeper for information and process it faster. In an election year they are also policy-hunting. The system is being overused, he says, but not abused. Use of the questions procedure to highlight party policy, sound off about successes, at home or abroad (in a word, politicking) is legitimate, under Standing Orders. Restraints apply more to the form of the question asked than its content or intention.

He would be "very reluctant" to see restrictions on rights to ask questions, but sees a need for M.P.s to exercise personal restraint, and to use other methods where possible. M.P.s would probably moderate their use of the procedure, however, only when they found themselves up against delayed answers, pleas that the material sought was simply not available in the form sought, or simply a “load of rubbish” as an answer, he said.

Mr G. W. Palmer, Opposition spokesman on constitutional affairs and the person in charge of the Opposition research unit, smarts at charges that the Opposition is clogging the system with unnecessary questions coming mainly in a “scatter-shot" fashion from the Opposition research unit. Very few questions originated from the unit, he said. Members wrote them. The questions procedure was not being abused because every question was being lodged in accordance with Standing Orders. Questions were also the most potent means the Opposition had of checking the actions of the executive, and getting information that would otherwise never surface. Opposition members were forming election policies and were determined to get information. Departments were the servants of Parliament, and departmental officials were paid to answer questions. In a toss-up between the democratic right to know, and complaints of pressure, the department had to be the loser, he said.

The member in charge of questions for the Government, the M.P. for Pahiatua, Mr J. H. Falloon, agrees. The questions procedure is not being abused, he says. It is merely proving itself a valuable Parliamentary tool. Government backbenchers also used it to ask often curly

questions of the executive. The question and answer method was a quick and efficient way of disposing of business, avoiding long debates. It was an excellent way of checking the veracity of comments made outside the House because lies found to be told in the Chamber exposed the member to the risk of enforced resignation. Answers were prepared by departmental people, who were politically neutral. Ministers were subjected to thorough cross-questioning on their answers in fortnightly debates on Ministerial replies to questions. and more mildly in supplementary questions immediately following the original answer.

"I don't like the number of questions being asked." Mr Falloon said. “I understand the workload it creates. But if departmental staff feel overworked, they’ll just have to live with it. So do we." It would be wrong to limit the number of questions. This would lead to party control of questions asked, and would hurt the individual backbencher for whom the Parliamentary question was a key means of investigating electorate affairs and getting some publicity for it back home.

Opposition and Government M.P.s differ on the essential nature of questions asked. Government members feel some Opposition questions are pointless; Opposition members say they have definite point.

The Opposition spokesman for Employment and Technology, Mr T. K. Burke, defended his recent 22 questions to the Minister of Labour asking for numbers of permanent fulltime jobs held in the private sector, public sector, and with local authorities in different districts in each financial year for the last 21 years. On due date for replies, the order paper carried a string of answers: “insufficient time available, work continuing."

Unemployment was the main issue of public concern, Mr Burke said. He had found that jobs in the private sector had dropped over that period on a national basis — a record that

seemed at odds with the Government's stated policy of fostering private enterprise. Bybreaking the material into districts. he could make useful comparisons, and give them to individual Opposition members to use in election campaigning in their electorates. The figures would also give clear indications of the Government’s jobcreating record in the past 20 years, against which promises of 410,000 jobs in the next decade could be tested.

He had under-estimated the amount of work involved in answering because an identical question on national figures for the same period had been answered only days earlier, he presumed from disrict office figures. These would have been readily available to answer the question, he thought. A question by the Opposition spokesman for housing, Mr M. K. Moore, asking how many Housing Corporation rental agreements were with tenants housing boarders, would have required staff to search manually 60,000 files. Mr Moore was told simply that the corporation kept no such statistics. The question was asked to help him in the final stages of his election housing policy, Mr Moore said. He was contemplating lowering rentals to corporation tenants housing boarders.

Mr Palmer said his 120-odd questions aimed at finding the numbers, costs and government appointments to statutory boards, tribunals and committees (quangos), might have appeared provocative. but were to help him construct a policy streamlining government operations by shedding wasteful functions.

He had asked the questions in batches deliberately, to save strain on the system, he said. Although he was commonly criticised for not simply referring to the document "Statutory and Allied Organisations.” this volume did not have the material he sought. It was not his policy, or as far as he knew, the' policy of any Opposition member, to use the questions procedure when other methods would yield the same information.