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House of Representatives                                Ch 15                                                 p 537

To the Speaker

At the conclusion of Question Time, Members may ask questions orally of the Speaker about any matter of administration for which he or she is responsible. ¹ However, Members seeking information on a matter of order or privilege must raise the matter under the appropriate procedure; such matters cannot be put to the Speaker as questions. ² Any Member may direct a question without notice to the Speaker, including Ministers and Parliamentary Secretaries. ³

Once exceptional, questions without notice to the Speaker have become more frequent in recent years. Many of these questions have related to procedural rather than to administrative matters. As such they fall outside the provisions of standing order 103, and also deviate from established practice that a procedural matter should be raised at the point at which it occurs. ⁴

In 1994 standing orders were amended to provide for questions to the Speaker to be taken at the conclusion of Question Time, ⁵ recognising what had in fact been the practice for some time. In earlier years the rare questions to the Speaker would be asked during Question Time proper, sometimes between questions directed to Ministers. When these arrangements operated Speakers suggested that Question Time was an inappropriate time to deal with minor or detailed matters of parliamentary administration and that they would be better dealt with by an approach to the relevant domestic committee, by correspondence or by personal interview with the Speaker. ⁶

Occurrences in committees may not be raised in questions to the Speaker as the Speaker has no official cognisance of such proceedings. ⁷

Originally it was not the practice for questions in writing to be directed to the Speaker. In order that Members might obtain information relating to the Parliament, the practice had developed for a question in writing to be directed to the Leader of the House or the Prime Minister requesting that the information be obtained from the Presiding Officer(s). In 1980 Speaker Snedden, commenting on the inappropriateness of past practice, introduced a procedure whereby requests for detailed information relating to the administration of the parliamentary departments could be directed to the Speaker. ⁸ The current practice is that such requests are lodged with the Clerk in the same way as questions in writing addressed to Ministers. However, a question to the Speaker, if in order, is printed in the daily Hansard rather than the Notice Paper. Answers provided by the Speaker are also printed in Hansard. ⁹

S.O. 103. For a description of the Speaker’s administrative responsibilities see Ch. on ‘The Speaker, Deputy Speakers and officers’.

May , p. 23rd edn, p. 344.

H.R.Deb. (19.8.2002) 4814.

And see statement by Speaker Hawker, H.R. Deb. (9.3.2005) 67.

VP 1993-95/779 (sessional order, made permanent in 1996). Since 1992 questions to the Speaker had been separately identified in Hansard under the heading ‘Questions to Mr Speaker’.

H.R. Deb. (1.12.53) 707; H.R. Deb. (1.11.33) 4117.

H.R. Deb. (16.4.64) 1136, 1138; H.R. Deb. (27.10.09) 5049.

H.R. Deb. (28.2.80) 499; e.g. see H.R. Deb. (26.11.80) 57-8, 118; H.R. Deb. (24.2.81) 43; H.R. Deb. (12.9.96) 4223.

E.g. H.R. Deb. (6.10.87) 827; H.R. Deb. (17.9.96) 4491-2.