Hide Rodney: Points of Order — Replies to Written Questions—Adequacy 
Hide Rodney: Points of Order — Replies to Written Questions—Adequacy 
[Volume:620;Page:15865] 
RODNEY HIDE (Leader—ACT) 
: 
 I raise a point of order Mr Speaker. Members have raised this issue before but I believe it is worthy of taking some of the time of the House. It relates to the difficulty the Opposition parties are having in getting answers from Ministers to parliamentary questions. 
In particular ACT has been trying for some months with dozens of parliamentary questions to the Minister of Health Annette King to find out about what simply used to be the health waiting list. The health waiting list has been divided into three different queues. ACT and the National Party have been asking questions about that and we have received answers from the Minister of Health referring us to the Ministry of Health’s website. That is OK—we are computer literate—but when we have gone to the Ministry of Health’s website we have not found the answers to our questions at all. We have continued from last year through to this year to ask questions about the numbers in the new category called GP Care—those people who have been taken off the list and sent back to their doctor. The Minister could not answer those questions because she was away or she was sick. Finally we got an answer that said the information was publicly available from the department. 
Well we tried to get it from the department. We went to the Ministry of Health’s website and we could not find it. We went off to the Parliamentary Library—Annette King is nodding her head because I think she knows about this problem—and staff members there looked on the website. They could not find it either so they approached the department. The department said that no that information is not publicly available and is not on the website —Annette King is agreeing with me on this— 
Hon Annette King 
: No I’m not. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: She is not! 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Would the member please come to the point of order. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: I would— 
Mr SPEAKER 
: Please come to the point of order. 
RODNEY HIDE 
: It is this: the Parliamentary Library following Annette King’s answers to us in Parliament went to the Ministry of Health which gave back the most extraordinary answer. It said that yes it had the information but that it needed the Minister’s permission to release it. That was at the end of months of trying. 
It is not just a case of my writing to you Mr Speaker or to the Minister of Health; it is a systemic problem that we have with this Government when we ask simple questions. First the Government takes a long time to answer; second when it gives the answer it is not an answer; third when we follow up on an answer that tells us to go to a particular web page we find that the information is not there; and fourth the Government tells us that the information is publicly available but finally the department responds and says that no it is not publicly available. This is a trashing of Parliament and a trashing of accountability. I will be writing to you Mr Speaker about this but I want you to appreciate how frustrating it is for our Parliament and how much it brings it into disgrace if simple answers cannot be given to simple questions. Instead we get nothing but the run-around. I know that every party in this Parliament outside the Government feels the same way.