The evidence taken before any Select Committee, and any document presented to a Select Committee, shall not be published by any member of the Committee, or by anyother person, before the Committee has presented its report to the House.
– Standing Order 61 of the House of Assembly on the premature publication of evidence.
MY FRIEND, the constitutional lawyer, appears to believe that one way out of the morass into which the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) has been thrown is to accept his view that statute law trumps the Standing Orders of the House of Assembly.
Now, it has long been accepted that one of the hard-fought-for rights and privileges of Parliament is for it to make its own rules for its own good governance.
That would suggest that no authority external to Parliament can impose rules or its will on the House.
The current Standing Orders of the House, from which the proscriptive section at the top of this piece is taken, took effect from 1973.
Prior to the enactment of the Public Accounts Committee Act 2003, the House, in its finite wisdom, did not contemplate the need for a special set of rules to govern the functioning of the PAC which it created as one of its Sessional Select Committees at Section 59.(1) There shall be a Committee of Public Accounts, for the examination of accounts showing the appropriation of the sums granted by Parliament to meet the public expenditure, and of such other accounts laid before Parliament as the Committee may think fit, to consist of not more than seven Members, who shall be nominated at the commencement of every Session, and of whom four shall be a quorum.(2) The Leader of the Opposition shall be Chairman of the Committee of Public Accounts.
In the intervening 40 years, no one, not even the former Deputy Speaker of the House, thought it necessary to advocate legislating the role and functions of the PAC since, as we are all agreed, the House makes its own rules for its own good governance.
However, politicians being politicians, they have never seen a problem which they cannot either throw money at or bend to their will through legislation.
That was the response of the Government in 2003, following complaints from the Opposition that Government members were tardy in attending PAC sittings and therefore it was difficult to form a quorum.
But there is an ole Bajan saying: one smart dead at too smart door!
Instead of simply amending the Standing Orders to permit the Opposition to form a quorum on its own without, no doubt, the very busy Government MPs attending to national business, the Government decided to go one step further and give the PAC its own legislation (an almost verbatim copy of the 1951 Australian law) complete with provisions that stand in clear conflict with its parent, the Standing Orders.
To deal with the vexed question of whether the PAC’s sittings should be held in public, Section 10 of the act says yes, but with certain exceptions:(1) Subject to subsection (2), the Committee shall take all evidence in public.(2) The Committee may, and at the request of the witness giving the evidence shall take in private evidence, whether oral or documentary, which in the opinion of the Committee relates to a secret or confidential matter.
And if there is a quandary for the PAC, this is it.
My friend suggests, and I agree, that prior to passage of the 2003 act, Parliament must have been aware of the Standing Orders, but he wants to be a mind-reader.
“One wonders therefore if Parliament would not have intended that sittings be held in public notwithstanding the Standing Orders,” he says.
“It seems to me that the 2003 act is the paramount law of the PAC and that once an act is passed covering the same ground as a Standing Order, Parliament must have been conscious of its own rules when it enacted the act and intended to change the relevant Standing Order in order to permit public hearings of the proceedings of the PAC.”
In the five years prior to the change in Government in 2008, there was no attempt to change the Standing Orders, and none since 2008 under the new Government.
The war between the two PAC parents was created by a too-clever Government that wanted to be give the impression it was assisting the Opposition with public hearings, but the clear, unmistakable effect was to hamstring the PAC.
Releasing it from the chains of the flawed legislation is simple: in the same way that some Standing Orders are suspended on Tuesdays when the House sits to allow certain debates to take place, why not suspend S.O. 61 when the PAC meets so the public can attend and the hearings can be published in the print, electronic, and even streaming media?
• Albert Brandford is an independent political correspondent. Email albertbrandford@nationnews.com