Speaker’s Rulings — Questions—Ministers’ Answers

On Thursday, the Hon Peter Dunne asked me to re-examine the rulings on Ministers’ answers, on the ground that they may be contradictory. I have done so, and I do not believe that they are contradictory. The Standing Orders and Speakers’ rulings require that the answers must be relevant to the question asked, but they do not—indeed, it would be impossible to do so, in any case—require that they are satisfactory to the House. Each member of the House decides for himself or herself.

What the Speakers’ rulings do recognise is that there may be occasions on which the Minister’s answer, though relevant, may be so patently inadequate that the Speaker may demonstrate some disapproval of it. In an extreme case such as that, the Speaker may invite the Minister to answer again, or even permit an extra supplementary question. No such circumstance arose last week.

I raise a point of order, Madam Speaker. I thank you for that ruling. I think it is very helpful, but could I suggest that the difficulty that has been emerging has been the conflict between the Speaker having no obligation over the quality or content of an answer, and the Speaker’s ruling that states that a question has to be addressed. I think that some of the points contained in your ruling, in terms of the circumstances in which the presiding officer might intervene to say that a question has not been satisfactorily answered, are very helpful. It might be a useful standard, moving forward, if they were to become the yardstick by which to adjudge whether a question has been addressed, rather than this constant situation we get now where questioners who feel they have not got the answer that they thought they were going to get, protest that the question has not been addressed. I take it from what you are saying that the two conditions that you set out in the ruling will be what you will be applying from now on in determining whether the question has been answered.

I thank the member for his observation, and may I suggest, as I have on numerous occasions in the past, that this matter would be more usefully taken up by the Standing Orders Committee.