Points of Order — Questions for Oral Answer—Prime Ministerial Responsibility forPecuniary Conflicts of Interest

I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. It concerns question No. 8 yesterday and the issue of ministerial responsibility. At the time you ruled—absolutely correctly, in my view—that the Prime Minister’s word as to whether he has responsibility ought to be accepted by the House. Mr Speaker, you went on to say: “it is better for Ministers to tell the House where they have no responsibility, rather than the Speaker intervene too much.” That is where the matter lay, and that is where we left it.

But you may want to take the matter into consideration, and I am asking you to do so. It seems to me that the cascade of logic goes something like this: the Prime Minister is clearly responsible for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, therefore he is clearly responsible for issues arising from the Cabinet Manual, and therefore he is responsible for issues that come under the issue of conflict of interest. One of the many ways of managing a conflict of interest is through a declaration of interests to the pecuniary interests register, and it seems to me that as far as Ministers are concerned—though not, I suspect, backbenchers—the Prime Minister has some obligation in that regard as well. I invite you, Mr Speaker, to reflect on that, and perhaps either offer some sort of a ruling or reflect on it and not offer us a ruling, and we will see how we get on in the coming session.

I thank the honourable member. The problem with the question asked yesterday was that it asked the Prime Minister about something that he, as Prime Minister, was not responsible for. The Prime Minister pointed that out. Speaker’s ruling 148/2 rules that a question that merely asks a member to confirm his or her private affairs is not in order. In the particular case of yesterday, the question related to a matter that I suggest is even less of the Prime Minister’s responsibility than that, because it asked about a company that the Prime Minister clearly has no responsibility for. The Prime Minister told the House that. I am not sure whether I need to reflect further on anything. I do not immediately see the difficulty. However, that is not to say I will not think about it; I will undertake to do so.