I think that would be the case. They're called committee secretaries in the Australian Parliament, but they're a head of a branch, really. Each committee has a number of staff members and these people are well-educated, well-qualified. Some are even Ph.D.-level people, such as those on their economics committee. They prepare questions for members of Parliament. We know that on some budgetary issues there will be party differences. If you were the Conservative member of Parliament, they would ask you what you wanted to ask and what information you needed for those kinds of questions, and they would go and find what you needed. So when you have the deputy minister of finance sitting in front of you, you have hard-hitting, probing questions. It's done with a civilized tone. You're not there to embarrass someone for the sake of embarrassing him. But they can't fob you off with non-answers either, because you have backup. That's what ideally should be the case.
I've talked to a lot of public servants. They're not afraid to come before House of Commons committees because of their supposedly being out of their depth in terms of their knowledge, but they're concerned about the unpredictability of committees. They know what a member of Parliament is going to ask. Some of them would like to have an intelligent dialogue on what the evidence suggests about how well this or that particular program is performing. So that's where you need to go. You need staff support enabling you not to become captive of some Parliamentary Budget Office or something like that, but to use constructively to guide your agenda and ensure that you get to the bottom of the issues you want to investigate.