Speaker’s Rulings — Questions for Oral Answer—Ministers' Replies

Last week I was asked to look at the issue of Ministers’ replies to questions. I do not intend to go over the rules on answering questions in detail again. There are many rulings on this given by me and my predecessors. These are set out on pages 144, 145, 146, and 147 of Speakers’ Rulings.

Basically, it is not the province of the Speaker to decide whether a Minister’s answer is correct or even whether it is adequate. The Speaker is not a quizmaster who decides whether the right answer has been given to a question. Many of the appeals that have been made to me on that subject treat the Speaker as if he is conducting some kind of quiz rather than a parliamentary question time. I remind members that question time is a political exchange. The adequacy of the performance of members, whether in Government or in Opposition, is judged on a political basis. The Speaker does not give them marks for performance as to the quality of their questions or their answers. Members cannot appeal to the Speaker every time they get an answer they do not like or are not satisfied with.

On the other hand, Ministers have a responsibility in the House, and through the House to the country, to account for the public offices they hold. Question time is an important element of this accountability. Ministers should therefore take questions seriously and endeavour to give informative replies to the questions that they are asked.

Finally, I want to add that I entirely reject the criticism that is made from time to time that our question process is inferior to that of other comparable Parliaments. That is simply not the case, and it is an unfair denigration of this Parliament to say so. I have often commented on Australia, but in the United Kingdom a question is not even accepted on a subject a Minister has refused to answer. Ministers in this Parliament are not so protected. Questions can be constantly addressed to Ministers regardless of how they have responded in the past. Our question time allows for a vigorous, up-to-the-minute and relatively informative exchange between members and Ministers each day on which the House sits. That does not mean that a Minister’s answer will satisfy members in every case, but there is nothing new in that.

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker.

Yesterday we had 51 points of order during question time. I hope we do not have the same number today, but we have not started question time yet.

💬 GERRY BROWNLEE: I make the comment that points of order will come from members if they feel the need to raise them. I thank you very much for coming back to the House with that ruling. It is very useful for us. However, I wonder whether you might elaborate just slightly on Standing Order 370(1), which suggests that an answer that seeks to address the question asked must be given if it can be given consistently with the public interest. That raises the point, particularly where it states “if it can be given consistently with the public interest”, of who is the subjective judge of that. It sometimes seems that answers are given in a way that certainly makes them appear to be inconsistent with an answer that is in the public good. So is it the Minister who makes that subjective judgment, or is it in fact, on behalf of Parliament and as an interpreter of the Standing Orders, the Speaker?

I think the member raises a very interesting question. It is an important one, and one that I have commented about on a number of occasions when that issue has been raised in the House. It does seem to me, at the end of the day, that the Minister has to be the person who decides whether giving an answer is consistent with the public interest, because only the Minister, at the end of the day, is privy to the information that may be relevant to that decision. A member may ask a question that involves matters that are not appropriate to be in the public domain for privacy reasons or other reasons, and by the very nature of that fact only the Minister can determine that, because should it then become a matter for discussion via the point of order procedure, that then negates the very reason for not giving the answer in the first place. The Speaker, at the end of the day, its seems to me, cannot really be in a position to be able to determine the factors that the Minister has taken into account in that respect. On the other hand, I would say that there would come a point where a Minister’s refusal to answer a question on the grounds that it was not in the public interest to give an answer would be so patently absurd and in contradiction with the facts, which would be obvious to all members, that the Speaker would be justified perhaps in making some comment in respect of that.

I have heard your report to Parliament, but if one looks at Standing Orders 370(1) and (2), then one sees that all that is required is that it be an issue complied with by Ministers consistently with the public interest, and that answers be concise and confined to the subject matter of the question asked. That is all that is required. If I could use an analogy, the communist countries all have magnificent constitutions—of course, those constitutions have nothing to do with people’s good order and harmony, and compliance with human rights is often not an issue that concerns the Governments of those countries. But I am concerned in this case, having heard your ruling, that it may sound fine, except that at this present time we are not getting at the truth of these matters. We are hearing every obfuscatory form of delay, and often 4 days later we get an answer.

We had classic examples last week, and even yesterday, when the Prime Minister said that if the member put a particular question down in writing he or she would get an answer. Until then we were led to believe by the Government and the Speaker that it was not in the public interest at all to answer. So extraordinary was it last week that the Minister of Police said this in answer to a question: “I do not have that information. I do not want that information …”. He got away with that in this House. He literally told this House that although the question was legitimately in the public and national interest, he would not even move a muscle to find out the truth. Your ruling allows him to get away with that, and in that sense I would put that on all fours with the analogy of the communist countries’ constitutions.

I think there are a couple of separate issues there. One is the issue of a member asking a question that the Minister does not have complete information on at the time that the question is asked. That is particularly likely to be so where questions to the Prime Minister cover an extraordinary broad range of matters and require a level of detail that the Prime Minister would need specific briefing on before being able to give an answer. But even within specific portfolios, it is not an uncommon feature for many members—and the member who has just spoken, I think, is probably the best at doing this—to ask a broad question, and it is not quite clear where the supplementary questions are coming from. Although the Minister may make every best effort to investigate 235 different programmes or 451 different cases that may come to mind, the chances are that it is the 452nd case that a supplementary question is on, and the Minister would not, in fact, have the information to answer that question at the time. It is a perfectly legitimate answer to indicate that the information will be made available as soon as possible. Otherwise, Ministers would spend their entire time on preparing for question time, instead of the considerable amount of time that does go into it, in the New Zealand Parliament.

Underlying what the Speaker said, the New Zealand Parliament has a more robust question time than that in many other democracies. For example, in Australia members are often lucky to get one supplementary question in on a principal question, and the Minister has 3 minutes, or even up to 5 minutes to answer one short question. So the Minister gets a speech in reply to one question, and there is often just one supplementary question following that.

On the other matter, on a number of questions last week we got into all sorts of detail, and I do not want to get into some of that. One of the key points is that there are areas where a Minister should not be involved, either because it is legally improper—in some cases, illegal—or because it is inappropriate. For example, a member may ask me as many questions as he or she likes about an individual tax case, but he or she will not get an answer out of me in terms of specifics, for a very simple reason: the Tax Administration Act provides that the Inland Revenue Department is not allowed to tell me about the details of an individual case. There is no point in asking me about it, because I am not allowed to know what, in fact, those details are. Sometimes I may know that through my hat as Minister of Finance, but that is a quite different matter, indeed. So there are those circumstances in which Ministers will indicate that it is not appropriate for them to be involved in providing an answer, because that in itself would be to get involved in an area that is not appropriate for the Minister to be involved in.

If Ministers felt that consistent with the public interest they could not give an answer, it would be helpful if they could actually say that, rather than give half an answer. If they said they could not answer a question because under Standing Order 370(1) that would be inconsistent with the public interest, then we would know where we stood. That is the first point.

The second point is that it does seem to me, Mr Speaker, that you are required to judge the answers given, at least in one respect. Standing Order 370(1) requires that Ministers must answer the question, subject to being—Michael Cullen can shake his head, but that Standing Orders states: “An answer that seeks to address the question asked must be given …”. Mr Speaker, you are at least required to rule that when a Minister gives an answer, he or she has sought to answer the question. The concern that members on the Opposition side of the House have is that Ministers are not seeking to answer questions; in fact, they are seeking every device known to mankind not to answer them. I accept that to give an answer could be, as in the example given by Dr Cullen, inconsistent with the public interest. A Minister should be upfront and say he or she cannot answer that question because of the public interest. However, if that test does not apply, then the requirement under the Standing Orders is that each and every Minister should seek to answer the question. That is the rule, and that is what we expect the Speaker to uphold.

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I think Mr Hide raised some very, very good points that should be considered. Perhaps one of the difficulties the House has at the moment is that, in your efforts to try to be fair to all parties, it now appears that parties have a fairly strict limit on the number of supplementary questions that can be asked. Opposition members expect that for every question they ask they will be able to ask two supplementary questions, and one supplementary question for each other question of the day, and they can choose when to use that limited number. This provides an opportunity for a Minister to engage in the frustrating exercise of giving parts of an answer, bits of an answer, or perhaps even red herrings as an answer, to burn up some of those supplementary questions and ultimately avoid some of the scrutiny. Frustration levels rise when members know that they are not getting the information that they themselves are quite often aware of, and they simply want the Minister to state that fact publicly. They are finding that the number of their supplementary questions is beginning to run out and therefore they are resorting to appealing to the Speaker, to protect their interests.

It might be worth considering, when a Minister appears to be obfuscating the questions that are being put to him or her, that the number of supplementary questions may continue for some time until answers are forthcoming or a statement is made, such as: “According to this part of my Act that I administer, I can’t answer you”, or: “In my judgment, in the public interest it’s best I don’t answer you.”

💬 Mr SPEAKER: I will hear the Hon Richard Prebble, as an experienced member.

I think the House is sympathetic to the point made by you and other Speakers, that it is not the job of the Speaker to judge the quality of answers. In the end, I guess it is the task of the electorate to judge whether Ministers are carrying out their tasks correctly. But we do have a dilemma. On occasions there are parts of questions that do not require a quality decision—it is obvious that the question has not been answered. I will give a hypothetical example, which I think we heard in the House. A member asks: “What is the revenue from speed cameras in the last year?”, and the Minister gets up and says that the revenue from the hours of eight in the morning to eight in the evening was X. That is not answering the question, but picking out a part of it. We had that question from Mr John Key the other day. He asked what was the total growth in Government revenue since the Labour Party came to office. Mr Mallard picked a date later than that and said—presumably perfectly accurately—that from 2000, or whatever date he picked, it was so much.

Mr Speaker, that does not require you to judge the quality of the answer. You can see that the question asked what was the growth of revenue from the time Labour came to office, and that the Minister chose to say that the growth of revenue from yesterday was X. I know those circumstances require a bit of judgment by the Speaker, but you are a senior member and I think you are capable of realising that the Minister did not address the question. He addressed a different question. That is the point I put to you. The Minister is required to address the question—not any old question, or a redrafted question. Most of the disputes between the Opposition and the Government occur because the Minister has given a perfectly adequate answer to a question that was not actually asked.

I was going to raise this as a separate point of order, but I think the ground Mr Prebble has covered leads neatly into the point I was going to address. Your ruling really restates what we have known for some considerable time, and that is as it should be. But it would useful to know how you now intend to enforce that ruling, in terms of the way questions are asked. That picks up on Mr Prebble’s point about answers that are part-answers, or answers to a different question from the one that was asked.

It seems to me that there can be no real objection to the notion that the Minister is the one responsible for the quality of the answer, not the Speaker, but because we have the provision in the Standing Orders about the question being addressed, that is where the conflict emerges. I think it would be quite useful, in terms of this particular discussion, if you were able to give the House a ruling, either now or separately, on how you intend to enforce the ruling you have just brought down, because I believe that is really what people are seeking.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: I will take a final comment from Dr Cullen.

It would seem to be difficult for you to indicate how you will interpret that last point, because it will be a matter for judgment in relation to specific questions and specific answers, and any objections thereto.

I might say that in my experience over the last year or two, we have seen many, many more points of order in question time than we have ever seen previously, and that has nothing to do with any changes in the nature of the answers being given. I suggest to you that in fact members might like to think a bit more carefully about some of the issues raised today. If we are to get into trying to judge answers too finely, we might as well also start judging some of the questions being asked. Many of the questions being asked are so poorly framed that they are capable of interpretation in any number of different ways. For example, a question last week about the growth in tax revenue was capable of being interpreted in a number of different ways. Strictly speaking, the question was asking to provide a cumulative amount since the Government came into office. It would be impossible to provide that answer because the Government did not come into office at the end of a month, which is the most minute form into which we break tax revenue down. We do not break it down into weeks or days. I make that point quite seriously because members opposite often ask very poorly framed questions and are then surprised that they do not get the answer they are looking for.

I might also note that the public is probably somewhat bemused to discover that we have had an admission from the Opposition spokesperson that Opposition members ask questions that they already know the answer to. The public might wonder why these questions are therefore being asked.

Secondly, I have noticed a great increase in the asking of multiple questions—one, two, three, four, five, even six questions are part of one question. If members care to read Speakers’ Rulings they will find that the rule is that a Minister has to answer only one of those questions. So when the members claim they are only getting a partial answer they are often getting an answer to one or two parts of a multi-part question. There is no requirement upon Ministers to answer more than one part of a multi-part question. I remind members, if they care to read Standing Order 370(1) again, that the ruling does not stop after “must be given” as Mr Hide seemed to assume; he missed out “… if it can be given consistently with the public interest.” A reply “seeks to address the question asked”. It is quite a low-level test, although it is one that incorporates a certain level of the Speaker’s interpretation of the mens rea involved in the Minister’s actions.

Finally, I might note that the time involved in question time has increased significantly. When I was first a member of Parliament, 45 minutes was allowed for question time. If questions were not reached in that time, it was hard luck and they were pushed to the next day. There was sometimes 4 or 5 days’ notice before they were reached. Therefore, the art of Government was to try to ensure as few questions as possible were answered in a day. I think the record we got down to at one point was three questions being answered in a 45-minute period. That is why we changed the Standing Orders, to provide for a specified number of questions. It does seem to be incumbent upon the Opposition parties in that situation to ensure that question time takes a reasonable amount of time, otherwise the pressure will come back upon the Government to provide a time limit within which question time has to occur. That would not be in the interests of the good running of this Parliament.

I have two final points. One is that there is nothing new in these points being raised. If members care to look up old Speakers’ rulings—not the most recent—they will find that Speakers’ rulings on some of these matters go back to the 19th century. So they should unburden themselves of the delusion that this is some kind of recent occurrence within Parliament. Finally, whatever the rulings are, I would argue that it is in the interests of this House for there to be some latitude of interpretation in question time. Mr Speaker, you and I remember one question time when a former Speaker decided to engage in a particularly picky interpretation of every question being asked, as to whether it was within the Standing Orders. My recollection is that one supplementary question was ruled as being in order on that particular day. This House runs on the basis of some latitude in interpretation, otherwise we would spend all our lives on points of order and not on asking or answering questions.

I thank all members for their contributions. I deliberately allowed this debate to go on because I did make quite a substantial ruling at the start of the day. I refer people to their Standing Orders and Speakers’ Rulings. There are very few members of this House who have had much more than a cursory glimpse at the Standing Orders. There are some honourable exceptions to that, and I would like to thank the Hon Richard Prebble for his particular comments, and the Hon Dr Michael Cullen.

I refer members first to Speaker’s ruling 144/5, ruled first by Speaker Harrison 24 years ago and then by Speaker Gray: “A Minister is not obliged to seek the call in answer to a question if the Minister does not intend to answer it. In these circumstances the Minister is treated as having refused to answer. There is no obligation to give reasons for a refusal to answer although it is preferable to do so. To avoid a series of supplementary questions it may be preferable to indicate the refusal to answer on a point of order.” Now that is, of course, the extreme end. I have always tried to make parliamentary question time worthwhile for those who are listening and for those who are participating. But members must remember that the scope of question time has expanded in recent years. Members can now ask opinions and include hypothetical material. Dr Cullen is right; I can remember when Speaker Wall ruled out all but one supplementary question, because he was interpreting the rule absolutely to the letter. I do not want to have to do that.

Questions no longer have to seek just factual material. It is therefore inevitable that there will be greater dissatisfaction with the replies to questions of much greater scope. Ministers have said from time to time that they cannot answer a question. I judge whether an answer seeks to address the question and from time to time I do require Ministers to expand on the answer and to answer the question, and that is as I have always thought my job to be. It is up to members to criticise Ministers’ replies. Ministers have always said: “I need notice of that question.” I have heard that phrase used since I first came into this House in 1967 and heard my first debates. It is not the Speaker’s role to judge whether answers are consistent with each other; that provision could only come into play if a Minister flatly refuses to answer. It does not happen very often. A Minister makes a political judgment and, of course, he or she can be roundly criticised for that. Now, I think that has answered most of the points that have been made.

Just so that this House does not get carried away with any of Gerry Wall’s decisions, I seek leave to table Mr Wall’s comments when he went to the Labour Party caucus to ask them whether he was gaga.

💬 Mr SPEAKER: Leave is sought for that purpose. Is there any objection? There is.