Mr LEO McLEAY(5.18 p.m.) —I second the amendment.

Mr Reith —I move that the question be put.

Mr LEO McLEAY —Mr Deputy Speaker, he cannot do that now. He doesn't know his job properly.

Mr DEPUTY SPEAKER —Order! The honourable member for Watson has seconded the motion. Please continue.

Mr LEO McLEAY —I intend to. I thank you very much. It is good that the Leader of the House has learnt something this afternoon.

Mrs Crosio —Did he apologise?

Mr LEO McLEAY —Of course not, because the Leader of the House (Mr Reith) is not interested in democracy in this House. He won the election and, quite rightly, the election gives him a mandate to do things, but there is also an issue of accountability in this place. The Leader of the House has to understand that part of that accountability is the parliamentary committee system. All that the opposition is asking for is a bit of fairness. In this House 123 members are able to participate in the committee system—the Speaker cannot, the ministers cannot, nor can the parliamentary secretaries. If you want to be strictly proportional—as the Leader of the House told us earlier in this debate he wanted to be—a strict proportionality of those members who are available to be members of committees would give the government—on a 14-member committee—eight members and the non-government members would have six.

The reality is that the government wants to destroy the convention of the past and take away, once again, another area of accountability to which parliament can call the government. We as the opposition would say that that is not a reasonable thing to do. I do not know why the Leader of the House is so frightened by the committee system, because the reality has been in the past that very few committees have had minority reports. The vast majority of their reports have been unanimous. Governments in the past have found the reports of a lot of the committees to be very helpful. In fact, ministers in the past have asked committees to carry out inquiries for them into areas which were difficult for the government, but if they could get a bipartisan approach out of a committee, then it was a useful process.

But to do that the opposition needs to have a reasonable representation on the committee. The proposition that the Leader of the House has put is that the government, because they have more members, might wish to increase the number of government members. We have no problem with that. But we think it is a bit rich to dilute the opposition's representation. We would not be not concerned if the government said they wanted to have 16-member committees—

Motion (by Mr Reith) put:

   That the honourable member be not further heard.