Mrs SULLIVAN(10.56 a.m.) —At the outset I want to congratulate you on your well justified elevation to the position of Deputy Speaker of the House of Representatives. I also congratulate the member for Casey (Mr Halverson) on his election as Speaker.

The member for Watson (Mr Leo McLeay) made some reference to the fact that I was a member of the Procedure Committee when it brought in the report About time. In fact, I was the deputy chair of that committee. I note that some other members of the committee are in the chamber today but not the chairman, who became the High Commissioner to London after the report was tabled.

I have a number of things to say, and I do not intend to respond in any great length to the comments of the member for Watson except to say this. In 1979, when I was in a previous political incarnation in another chamber, I chaired a government members' committee that looked at sitting hours. After extensive consultation with staff, members of the opposition and everybody else, we brought in a report which was thrown out by the government of the day. In 1981 that committee was revived following the premature death of Senator John Knight at the age of 38. The committee brought down another report which was again rejected by the government of the day but which led to some amended hours in the Senate following a free vote in the Senate.

Through all that procedure various people said to me, `Look, we really have gone down this path endless times before.' Former Senator Fred Chaney's father had also apparently tried to do something about the sitting hours when he was a member in the 1950s. There are a lot of new members in the chamber today, and I say to them that they will have this debate in the parliament a lot of times in their political incarnations and they will all get a go at it. The member for Adelaide (Ms Worth) will get another go at some time in the future, as I hope I will.

Mr Crean —We want it now. It's good now.

Mrs SULLIVAN —It is good now and we will spend a couple of minutes debating it, but the motion the government has moved does far more profound things than changing the sitting hours. The government's motion goes to the heart of the operation of this chamber and indeed of parliamentary democracy. So I am not going to spend all my time commenting on sitting hours, as the honourable member for Watson did, except to say this. The member for Moore (Mr Filing) and I put forward a dissenting report to the report About time which included sitting hours. We put forward a different set of hours, and that was rejected by government and opposition alike. I have to say that there was not any consensus. I recall that there was a certain amount of ramming down necks, as the member for Moore will bear out. In fact, there was not much interest at all in consensus when discussing the dividing issue of sitting hours. I hope in future whenever the subject is debated again—and I am sure it will not be this year—that we might again canvass some of those options.

The essence of this debate is far more important things. It is the matter of the parliamentary roster. I pay tribute to the member for Hotham (Mr Crean). I am pleased to see that he is the Manager of Opposition Business. I paid him this tribute before when he was a minister in the previous government: he was the only minister who, when conducting his own business in this chamber, took pains to meet the political and parliamentary niceties. It is a welcome change that we will have someone who acknowledges the importance of parliament running affairs for the Labor Party in this parliament. I am sure he is more than a little embarrassed by some of the things that he had to do and say today, but I hope that is an indication that over time government and opposition in this chamber will move forward to a better parliamentary procedure. The motion that the Leader of the House (Mr Reith) has put down today is a first step in that process.

The first point is the matter of the question time roster. Many were the times when we were sitting on the other side of the House that the then Leader of the House, now the Leader of the Opposition (Mr Beazley), got up and was wont to use as defence on things like the debacle of the question time roster we had: `Oh, but reforms were recommended in the Procedure Committee report.' In fact, only a minority of the reforms that were recommended in that report were implemented by the then government and we had bastardised versions of other recommendations.

For the record, and for the interest particularly of new members, the then opposition, by consensus with the government on that occasion, did agree to a trial of a limited roster in question time. It was that on Mondays—and Mondays only—there would be a limited roster, on the understanding that if the opposition wanted to question a minister who was not on the roster it had the right to veto that minister's absence. So the opposition had the right to call for a minister who was rostered off—only on that Monday—to be in here to answer questions. That is all the roster was. We agreed under some pressure but wanting, maybe, to be reasonable, to free up question time a little, so that on the Monday of sitting weeks some ministers could be absent by agreement.

However, there had to be consultation between government and opposition. The Leader of the House now, who was then the Manager of Opposition Business, is well aware of the fact—and would agree with me—that every now and then the then government used to come out with a new roster—never mind only for Mondays, but for the whole week. There was never any consultation by the government. It was a case of: `We'll fax it through to your office.' The Leader of the House agrees. That is as much consultation as there was. It was faxed to everybody else at exactly the same time and it was, simply, `like it or lump it'. There was no consultation. There was no to or fro between government and opposition. It was just: `cop it sweet'. That was the record of the Labor government here.

The Howard government has now decided to scrap the roster because it was a mess, it was a debacle, it was an insult to the people of Australia. Question time is a critical time for government and opposition members to question the executive government. It is not the members who are important in this; it is the people on whose behalf they do the questioning, the people they represent—the people of Australia. Question time is a critical time in the operation of our whole parliamentary democracy. It is not for the benefit of opposition members or of government members but for the benefit of the people of Australia.

I will make a quick reference to the previous 3 o'clock timing of question time versus the 2.30 timing which was recommended by the Procedure Committee and the 2 o'clock timing being proposed today. The 2.30 timing was an attempt at consensus and consideration. At the time that it appeared to be emerging that the committee was going to come to a 2.30 recommendation—and somehow these things had a way of appearing in print in the newspaper; we never did quite identify who was responsible for all those leaks, although I think if you read the debate you would have a fair idea who most of us thought it was. The ABC communicated with the committee and pointed out that if we had a 2.30 start to question time, and if we went the normal 45 minutes that the House then had for question time, we would be overlapping its children's program and that this had serious programming implications for it.

I do not watch the ABC at 3 o'clock in the afternoon ever, whether parliament is sitting or not. It is a time when I am at work so I was not aware, as I am sure nearly all of the other members of the committee were not aware, of the ABC television programming imperatives at 3 o'clock. So we proceeded to a 2.30 recommendation in the knowledge that that would mean the truncation of the broadcasting of the House of Representatives, although we always hoped that the ABC might be prepared to shift a few minutes for us. In the event, when we started on that procedure—

Mrs Crosio interjecting—

Mrs SULLIVAN —That is exactly what I am talking about. I point out to the member for Prospect that she was quite happy to sit there while members of the opposition raised the issue which I am rebutting, without feeling the need to raise the matter of relevance with the then occupant of the chair.

So we had embarked on that procedure in ignorance of the ABC situation. The Keating government, in its party room, jettisoned the committee's recommendation of 2.30 and went for 3 o'clock, which it knew the ABC absolutely would not accept. It knew that there would be absolutely no room for manoeuvre and for broadcasting the House of Representatives question time, which prior to that time had been broadcast on alternate days with the Senate. So we had the situation where the Senate was then broadcast every day and we were broadcast at midnight, or 1 o'clock in the morning or something like that, apart from the little colour pieces that used to appear on the evening television news.

So in moving back to 2 o'clock, the government has made a decision. The 2.30 time was proposed by the Procedure Committee out of consideration for ministers and ministers' commitments, to make it a little easier for them to attend question time than 2 o'clock did. This government has taken the one decision it is perfectly entitled to decide to take, that is, that ministers are going to have to be here at 2 o'clock. It is not asking for any leeway for its ministers. I do not see how anybody could possibly object if the government has decided to inflict on itself something that the Procedure Committee would have been a little kinder to it about.

I also welcome the change in the second reading speech situation. For the benefit of members who were not here, there was a time, when it was moved that a bill be read a second time, that the minister would then give the second reading speech, that is, the speech to the parliament and to the public about the content of a bill that is being presented for debate together with its rationale. The debate would then be adjourned after the second reading speech, the procedure for many years. What the Keating government did was knock out the minister's second reading speech at that time.

Under Labor, we did not get the minister's second reading speech until the bill was going into its full-scale debate, which meant that shadow ministers and members participating in the debate did not have access to that speech, to that explanation or to the political rationalisation, did not have the minister's words to echo or rebut, whatever the case might be. I know that there were some ministers who, when approached by the shadow minister, would make the second reading speech available in advance of the debate—

Mrs Crosio —Always.

Mrs SULLIVAN —Not always. The member for Prospect can speak only for herself. That is absolutely not right. You were a parliamentary secretary and I was a shadow parliamentary secretary. I know the difficulty we had in getting out of the office of the minister for health a second reading speech on any health bill. I know because in those days I had to speak on health bills on behalf of the opposition. You could not get it, except maybe half an hour beforehand if you were lucky. There was many a shadow minister who could say the same.

We shall return to the opposition the courtesy and the advantage of knowing the content of the second reading speech. It is not a case of returning it to the opposition but, rather, returning it to the people of Australia. When a law is proposed in this parliament members are entitled to know the rationale and real implications of that law so that they are able to debate it in a way that their constituents are entitled to expect they would. I welcome that change. That was also a recommendation of the Procedure Committee which was not taken up by the previous government.

Finally, because time is limited, I want to say a few words about the grievance debate. A quite incorrect assertion was made by the opposition when that was mentioned earlier today. I welcome the fact that we will have a guaranteed minimum time for the grievance debate. In theory we had that under the arrangements that the previous government put in place, but it did not happen. There was a theoretical time for question time but it habitually went over time. This was not to the advantage of members asking questions. It was due to the fact that we used to get six- to 10-minute government diatribes—they were not answers to questions. We had record low numbers of questions despite a record length of time for question time. On Mondays it was the grievance debate that was truncated by the extended answers to questions by then government ministers. That was what happened to the grievance debate.

The Procedure Committee addressed this when it revisited the earlier changes and it recommended a guaranteed minimum time for the grievance debate. If you go back to that report that revisits the About time changes you will find that the truncation of time for the grievance debate was specifically addressed. It became a specific subsequent recommendation of the Procedure Committee that the grievance debate ought to have a guaranteed time. I particularly welcome that review and that aspect of the motion moved by the Leader of the House today.