Brownlee GerryHon GERRY BROWNLEE (National—Ilam): The Leader of the House finished by thanking the Business Committee for the consideration that's gone into the preparation of this particular motion. The good orderly practice of parliamentary democracy does require that there is quite an agreement about the way that the processes of the House are run. We may of course find that some of those processes are slightly derailed by some interesting rulings and decisions that are made on a daily basis but in general there is an effort made—and I've certainly found that to be the case in my time as Leader of the House—by all parties to try and work towards results that give a sound and well-understood process for the operation of the House.The first part of this motion today—as has been outlined by the Leader of the House—allows for the Budget to be delivered on any sitting day that is previously notified to the House. The practice used to be that the Budget process was quite tightly held. It still is to some extent; crucial numbers are generally not known until the Budget is delivered. But many of the aspects are now notified to the public even months ahead of time. So there was a time for example when people would hear the Budget read at around 7 o'clock in the evening and they would then work out whether or not they were going to be paying more for their cigarettes their petrol their various other consumer items—even milk and postage were part of it—that would have a new price on them by midnight. And you'd often see people rushing to the petrol stations particularly to fill up. Nowadays of course that sort of price increase appears to be happening on almost a 24 hour basis. So the need to wait annually for the Budget for the urgent fill-up has been removed but none the less the pain of having to do so remains.The point is that if you look at almost all of the aspects that were once pretty new and novel in the announcement of a Budget they are now generally well-known to the public. It's largely bigger programmes that the Government might be about to embark on that are laid out in the Budget and most often they will not have a commencement date—given it's a May Budget—probably until the October or the following April. So the need to have that drama of the Thursday night Budget or as has been the case since about 1985 I think the 2 o'clock in the afternoon Budget on a Thursday at the end of the week is now somewhat mitigated.So my hope would be that we actually see a Budget delivered on a Tuesday and that while the full contingent of the media scrutiny is here that Budget is discussed by the House in the days that come immediately after without the pressure for urgent legislation because while that can come out of a Budget the trend in recent years has been for there to be less urgent legislation than was once the case. So we see a simple change to the Standing Orders that accommodates what actually happens now.Look the only other point I'd like to make here is that the change to the Estimates week is still subject to the Business Committee's decision. It simply enables the Business Committee to take particular actions. I think it's worked well in the last few years and I hope that what it means is that there is a greater scrutiny in the future during that week or those weeks by media on the key aspects of any ministry that is effectively being examined and questioned about the taxpayer money that they're going to spend in the coming year. This has been a process that has seen the Business Committee consider this. All of it has been on the table for quite some time and I think it's a good thing to see it all come together in this particular way.The extension of the time by which the Budget has to be reported back to the House—the three months as it once was now out to four months—also reflects the changing times that we live in and the fact that most of the information that might previously have come out of those debates is now generally in the public arena well and truly ahead of that time. We will be supporting this motion.