This is a subject near and dear to my heart. I'm really interested in how we produce useful information for members of legislatures.
What is relevant information is partly in the eye of the beholder. You have 308 members of Parliament working in different parties. Their perspectives are somewhat different. So what one person considers relevant at one point in time in one committee setting will be quite different from another.
There's even the question of what constitutes quality information. What you regard as a quality piece of analysis I might disagree with, because we come from different perspectives and so on. In Australia, the committees commission research, and the public service often delivers research.
Most of the reports we were talking about earlier are produced mainly for internal accountability purposes, including being filed with the Treasury Board Secretariat, which is the central budgetary agency of government. They aren't produced, in the first instance, for parliamentarians. So how do you serve different audiences and ensure that you get just the right information, in the right amount, in the right format into the right hands?
I mentioned the parliamentary budget statements. The second accountability document for parliament is called the annual report. The characteristic of the annual report that makes it most useful to parliamentarians is that it has a narrative quality to it. The public servants are required to tell the performance story of the department. What did they plan to spend the money on? Why did they under-spend or overspend? What targets did they have in terms of outputs, goods and services, and programs they promised to deliver? Do they have any outcomes data? Did they make a change within society?
All of that is contained within the annual reports. They've been producing annual reports for a long period of time, so they've gotten used to serving parliamentarians.
Our system is still in its relative infancy, and there's too much information. I think the phrase I used is that MPs are stuffed with information and starved for understanding. You have this mountain of information come at you, and you just don't know what to do with it.