The Weatherill Government has maintained its ‘secret state’ mentality this year by continuing to increase the number of parliamentary questions it refuses to answer as well as now taking up to 2½ years to provide responses which don’t even address the questions.
For example, in June 2010 Minister Gago was asked how many frequent flyer points she had accumulated from taxpayer-funded travel and whether any had been used for travel by her or any other person.
Almost 2½ years later, Minister Gago provided a response which refused to indicate how many points she had received:
“Frequent flyer points are derived from both business and personal travel and it is ensured that over time only privately earned points are used for private purposes.”
There are other examples of excessively long delays in answering questions:
• Minister Kenyon took 2 years to indicate his department had employed a person who had previously taken a separation package.
• Minister Hill took 2½ years to answer a question about overspending and underspending in agencies for which he was responsible.
• Premier Weatherill took a year to provide a ‘non-answer’ to a question about the total cost of each Thinker in Residence program.
• Minister Caica took 15 months to indicate he had taken no overseas trips in 2010.
“This is clearly a deliberate Government strategy to prevent the release of any information or to delay the release of limited information until a time well after it might be useful to the media or Opposition,” Shadow Finance Minister Rob Lucas said.
“Despite promising to be different, Premier Weatherill’s record in 2012 in answering questions was even worse than Premier Rann’s performance in previous years.
“On 9 November 2011, Premier Weatherill told Parliament:
“Certainly, all of the questions that will be asked of us will be given proper answers…we will strive to give information to the House, as I always have.”
“At the end of 2012 there were 3,470 unanswered parliamentary questions, which was actually 464 more than at the end of 2011.
“This is yet another broken promise by the Premier.
“There are now 1,823 unanswered questions in the House of Assembly and 1,647 in the Legislative Council on issues including details of Health Department spending, Ministerial travel expenses and Thinker in Residence salary or remuneration.”
|
Total Questions
|
Answered
|
Unanswered
|
% Unanswered
|
|
|
House of Assembly
|
3778
|
1955
|
1823
|
48.25
|
|
Legislative Council
|
2698
|
1051
|
1647
|
61.04
|
|
Total
|
6476
|
3006
|
3470
|
53.58
|
“After taking more than 30 overseas trips each, both Mr Rann and Mr Foley left Parliament without ever answering questions about the total number of frequent flyer points they had received since 2002, which they were able to take with them into retirement.
“This Government’s performance is manifestly inadequate, and Premier Weatherill must explain why his government is so anxious to cover up embarrassing information from becoming public.
“This is an increasingly arrogant government that continues to thumb its nose at transparency and accountability.
“As former Premier Mike Rann said in his 2002 Plan for Honesty in Government, ‘a good Government does not fear scrutiny or openness’.”