Personal Explanations — Written Questions—Corrections to Written Answers

Because it may be relevant to my answer for oral question No. 12 today, I wish to seek to correct an answer to a written question.

💬 SPEAKER: The member seeks the permission of the House—the leave of the House—in order to make a statement in order to correct an answer to a written question. Is there any objection to that? There is none.

In preparing for oral questions, it became clear that the detail provided in a response to written question No. 31387 (2019) may not have been accurate. The Ministry of Social Development will be providing me with an amended answer to rectify this as soon as possible.

💬 Hon Gerry Brownlee: What’s the correction?

💬 SPEAKER: Well, it’s—[Interruption] Order! Order! The member has made it clear that she has a new interim answer in place for that, as members do every now and again, unfortunately too often—well, probably not often enough, because there are not enough Ministers who correct them when they should. But until the final answer is available, there’s nothing I can do to sort it out any further.

💬 Hon Gerry Brownlee: I raise a point of order, Mr Speaker. I’d just ask you to consider how this works, when the Minister herself, clearly, is aware—because we don’t, with all due respect, know exactly the contents of question 31387, but we can assume now that it relates to the number of families receiving support from Work and Income, and the question will be, if we’ve relied on that answer for the verification for the question in the House, then how is it reasonable that we use some of our questions to a Minister, now based on incorrect information? The Minister will be able to refer to the fact that I’ve corrected myself.

💬 SPEAKER: Sure, and it’s a very fair point, and I’m going to suggest to the House that if the member responsible for the question seeks the leave of the House to have a question tomorrow instead of today, and a proportion of the supplementaries be carried over as well, if the National Party so wish, then I think it would not be good if anyone declined leave for that to occur. So the member’s got until the time to sort it out.