I probably do need to talk a little bit about the impression that I may have given of general indifference to the estimates, because I certainly don't want to create that impression. I think that MPs, generally speaking, go through the considerable inconvenience and challenge of becoming involved in politics because they are very passionate about what government does and how public money is spent.
That passion surfaces from time to time in discussions of singular issues that catch parliamentary and public attention. I'm talking about not so much indifference as an almost act of revulsion to the appearance every year of the estimates documents in large piles and reports, which most MPs who I have talked with personally find to be very turgid and uninformative. They feel that these things are being inflicted upon them and they have to wade their way through them to do the formal estimates work, and then at the end of the formal estimates work there's nothing much to do with the estimates other than report them back.
It's not so much indifference as perhaps an element of hopelessness produced by the constraints of the formal estimates process.