Evidence of meeting #22 for Procedure and House Affairs in the 42nd Parliament, 1st Session. (The original version is on Parliament’s site, as are the minutes.) The winning word was zealand.
A video is available from Parliament.
6:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
We are in session. Thank you, everyone, for coming and all the House of Commons staff for being here late. Thanks to our friends from Australia for being here early. We're trying to get going here.
What time is it there?
6:05 p.m.
David Elder Clerk of the House, Australia House of Representatives
It's 8:00 Wednesday morning.
6:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
Good evening. This is Meeting No. 22 of the Standing Committee on Procedure and House Affairs for the first session of the 42nd Parliament. This meeting is held in public and is televised.
This is our second meeting of the day. The committee agreed to meet outside its usual time in order to accommodate our witnesses, who are appearing by video conference at 8:00 a.m. in Australia, and from New Zealand in our second hour. This meeting is part of our study of initiatives towards a more efficient and inclusive House.
Our first panel is from the House of Representatives of the Parliament of Australia. We have David Elder, Clerk of the House, and James Catchpole, Serjeant-at-Arms.
I invite the clerk to make his opening statement, and then we'll have some questions and answers.
The floor is yours.
6:05 p.m.
Clerk of the House, Australia House of Representatives
Thank you, Chair. Good morning to you from Australia, and good evening to you in Canada.
My colleague James Catchpole and I have prepared for the committee a few notes on the matters we think you're covering in your proceedings. I didn't propose to make anything much in the way of an opening statement. We're just happy to respond to questions the committee might have.
In the Australian Parliament, particularly in the House of Representatives, we've taken a number of procedural initiatives that I think are very significant. Perhaps they put us at the leading edge of what's been done procedurally in the way of catering to women in a parliamentary jurisdiction. We have a range of more practical initiatives, which I'm sure are of great assistance to women or men who might have young children.
I think we have quite a good story to tell about some of the things that have been done here, and I'm happy to elaborate on those in response to any questions the committee might have.
6:05 p.m.
Liberal
The Chair Liberal Larry Bagnell
We're trying to study ways to make Parliament more inclusive of all groups, to make it more efficient, more friendly. So you could talk about hours of sitting, the number of days you sit in a year, what days you have votes, maternity leave, child care, or anything else that would make Parliament more efficient and inclusive.
What we'll do is turn it over to each member of the committee.
We're going to start with David Graham.
6:05 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
This morning we had a very interesting conversation with your counterparts in England. They talked with great enthusiasm about the model they got from Australia on the secondary chamber. This is something we've all learned about in this study. I don't think any of us had ever heard of it before. I was wondering if you could give us a bit of background on it from your perspective as the initiators of this brilliant concept and tell us what we can learn from you about it.
6:05 p.m.
Clerk of the House, Australia House of Representatives
Our second chamber, which is now called the Federation Chamber, commenced in 1994. I suppose the background to the initiative was that there seemed to be a lot of pressure on the time in the House, and it was not unusual for government to be, as we call it, “guillotining legislation” through the House, simply because there wasn't sufficient time for the House to be able to consider it. The whole thought behind what we now call the Federation Chamber, which is effectively a second chamber of the House of Representatives, is that it could run in parallel with the sittings of the House and consider, on reference from the House, a number of matters that would otherwise be considered and debated in the House of Representatives.
For example, the bread and butter of the Federation Chamber is the consideration of government legislation. Instead of the House of Representatives—the main chamber—having to consider all the bills that the government introduces, there is a Federation Chamber that runs at much the same sitting times as the House and can consider bills up until the very final stages.
The Federation Chamber is not an initiator of items of business and is not a completer of any items of business. It receives items of business from the House. It fully considers them, returns them to the House, and then the House finalizes the process. For example, with government legislation, all the bills will be introduced in the House and all of them will have their final third reading back in the House, but the whole middle bit, the consideration both of a second-reading debate as well as what you would call the committee stage of debate, can all happen in the Federation Chamber.
It's very interesting. If you look at the statistics since 1994, the Federation Chamber when it was first established met for around 15% of the time of the House. At one stage in the last Parliament that went up to about 50% of the time of the House. It has perhaps fallen away to the more traditional level of around 30%. As you can see, that's 30% that would otherwise need to have been occupied by the House and is now being occupied by a chamber running in parallel. It's had a hugely significant impact on the way the House can do its business.
6:10 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you.
Australia is a rather geographically similar country to ours. Could you just give a bit of background on how MPs get back and forth in Australia, and how often in the year they have to do that? How does that impact your schedule?
6:10 p.m.
Clerk of the House, Australia House of Representatives
Sure. Obviously, the Parliament is based in Canberra, and as you say, Australia, like Canada, is a very big place. Members do a lot of travelling within their own constituencies and some of them have huge constituencies, just as I'm sure there are some huge constituencies in Canada. For example, most of the Northern Territory is one of the constituencies. Two-thirds of Western Australia is another one. They're absolutely huge.
Of course, those members also need to travel to Canberra. We sit about 18 to 20 weeks a year. We tend to sit in two-week blocks at a time, and then there will be a one- or two-week break between those blocks of sittings. We have three longer breaks during the year, which might be six-week breaks.
To be very frank, when members come to Canberra, they want to maximize the time that they can spend on parliamentary business while they're here so that they can get back as soon as they can to their constituencies, where, let's face it, a lot of the real and very important work for them has to happen. We currently have an election going on here in Australia, and that's what it's all about. It's all about being re-elected by your constituents, so you want to pay a fair bit of attention to them.
That's pretty much the context. Members travel to Canberra. They'll travel for the two weeks of sittings. Some members who come from great distances might stay for the duration of the two weeks, but many will return to their constituencies over the weekend between the two sitting weeks.
The House sits from Monday to Thursday. We finish at about 5 p.m. on Thursday, which enables quite a lot of members to get back to their constituencies on Thursday evening. Then they usually travel back to Canberra on Sunday afternoon for sittings on the Monday.
That's the general sort of pattern of travel. There is a lot of travel for all our members because, as you know, it is a vast country. But members are very keen, and the whole sitting pattern has been built around concentrating their time in Canberra and doing as much as they can, rather than having, say, more sitting days dispersed throughout the calendar.
6:10 p.m.
Liberal
David Graham Liberal Laurentides—Labelle, QC
Thank you. That's a good background start.
I know I don't have a lot of time. I have one last question before I hand it over to Ms. Vandenbeld, if there's time left.
There's a concept you have I don't think anybody else in the world has, and I'd love it if you could explain it to our committee. Could you please explain “double dissolution”?
6:10 p.m.
Clerk of the House, Australia House of Representatives
A very long explanation would be needed. The shortened version is that it's a mechanism for resolving differences between the two Houses, the Senate and the House of Representatives, where the Senate has failed to pass legislation on two occasions that the House of Representatives has initiated. It's a mechanism by which those sorts of deadlocks and disagreements between the Houses can be resolved. They're resolved by means of a general election, and unusually it's a general election for the full composition of both Houses. Usually for our Senate, there's only a half-Senate election. At each election period, only half the Senate is re-elected, but with a double dissolution the full Senate is dissolved and there's an election for the full Senate. That's the difference between our two election patterns, and that's quite a novelty for you in Canada, where you don't have an elected upper house.
6:15 p.m.
Liberal
6:15 p.m.
Conservative
Jamie Schmale Conservative Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON
Thank you very much, gentlemen, for being with us this morning.
Just to build on what you had mentioned regarding Friday sittings, are you able to tell us why Fridays are no longer in the sitting schedule? Why was that taken away?
6:15 p.m.
Clerk of the House, Australia House of Representatives
I think it was related to what I've said about the demands that members have. We had a brief experiment a number of years ago with the reintroduction of Friday sittings, but it only lasted one sitting Friday. It was best described as probably a complete debacle. It had nothing to do with the fact it was a Friday, but there were other factors involved. Members do like to return to their constituencies for the weekend. Finishing at 5 p.m. on Thursday is convenient to enable them when travelling to Queensland, and South Australia, and even Western Australia. The Western Australian members can get back to Perth from Canberra on that Thursday evening. I don't think there's any great stomach for Friday sittings any longer, because they don't enable members to get back to where they think their real work is, and that is back in their constituencies.
6:15 p.m.
Conservative
Jamie Schmale Conservative Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON
That's interesting.
What would be the composition, if you could guess...? I'm guessing by the schedule you just pointed out, and what you said in your last statements, there wouldn't be a lot of MPs bringing their families to the capital.
6:15 p.m.
Clerk of the House, Australia House of Representatives
Sometimes they do. Female members with very young children will be bringing their children to Canberra, because they're still breastfeeding those very young children. During school holidays, if our sittings happen to coincide with school holidays, you'll see probably more families of members in Canberra. There are some entitlements of members that do enable them to bring their families to Canberra for those sitting weeks. They can be funded at the taxpayers' expense to come to Canberra, so they can be with the member. Generally speaking, members would tend not to bring their families to Canberra, with those exceptions I've indicated.
6:15 p.m.
Conservative
Jamie Schmale Conservative Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON
For those that do, what kind of services are offered in the capital for those with children, such as day care and that kind of thing?
6:15 p.m.
Clerk of the House, Australia House of Representatives
I might get my colleague, James Catchpole, to respond to that. He's the Serjeant-at-Arms and the nuts-and-bolts person who looks after all the welfare of members and so on.
6:15 p.m.
James Catchpole Serjeant-at-Arms, Australia House of Representatives
There is a child care centre on site at Parliament House that's open to all members and senators, and also to building occupants. It's provided by a private child care service that's contracted to our department of parliamentary services. That's open essentially year-round, and members bring their children there. We also have several breastfeeding rooms for nursing mothers in the building. We also have family rooms in the building where people can bring their children. We have small playpen areas, TVs, and entertainment for young children and babies. Cots are available.
The commonwealth car service, called COMCAR, is a car and driver service. They have baby seats and baby harnesses, so that members can bring their children to and from parliament. Of course, members can keep their children in their suites.
6:20 p.m.
Conservative
Jamie Schmale Conservative Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON
In terms of Fridays, you said that when you brought Fridays back for one sitting it was a bit of a debacle. What did you mean by that?
6:20 p.m.
Clerk of the House, Australia House of Representatives
There was a particular context to it.
It was going to be a purely private members' business day, so there was not going to be a question period as there usually is on a sitting day. The then prime minister and other ministers made it clear that they wouldn't necessarily be there for those sittings, and they didn't need to be because the focus was going to be on private members' business.
The then opposition chose to effectively completely disrupt the day. They were opposed to the idea. It was introduced without their support, and so the day was completely disrupted. Because it was private members' business, we had arrangements, for example, so that no votes or divisions could take place on that day. That meant that the chair had no way of dealing with disorder because they couldn't name members and have them excluded from the House on a vote of the House.
It actually just descended into chaos. That would be a fair description of what happened. There were no more Friday sittings after that.
6:20 p.m.
Conservative
Jamie Schmale Conservative Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON
You said the opposition was against it because the Friday sittings were brought in against their will.
Did I hear that correctly?
6:20 p.m.
Conservative
Jamie Schmale Conservative Haliburton—Kawartha Lakes—Brock, ON
Obviously with private members' business, there's a little difference with ours. We have question period and a few other things on Friday. It would be a little different.
How much time do I have?