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The Australian Journal of Public Administration, vol. 68, no. 4, pp. 373–398 doi:10.1111/j.1467-8500.2009.00646.x RESEARCH AND EVALUATION Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia Paul G. Thomas University of Manitoba This article examines how the Commonwealth Parliament of Australia seeks to hold responsible ministers directly and senior public servants indirectly accountable for the performance of departments and programs on the basis of published performance data and inquiries conducted by parliamentary committees. From the perspective of an outsider, the scrutiny process in the Australian parliament, although not without its problems, is more systematic and substantive than is the case in other parliamentary systems such as Canada. Creating a more meaningful dialogue in the Australian parliament on performance issues will depend more on changes to the intersecting cultures of the legislature, government and the public service than on organisational and procedural reforms to any of those institutions. Key words: accountability performance, parliamentary scrutiny, estimates hearings This article focuses on how the Commonwealth assessing parliament’s overall performance of Parliament of Australia seeks to hold respon-its scrutiny role, it is necessary to distinguish sible ministers directly, and senior public ser-between the contribution of the House of Repvants indirectly, accountable for the perfor-resentatives, which is generally seen to be unmance of departments and programs on the der tight government control, and that of the basis of published performance data and in-Senate where the usual absence of a governquiries conducted by parliamentary commit-ment majority is said by many informed ob- tees. The publication of information about servers to permit a stronger legislative review performance does not in itself constitute ac-and scrutiny function. countability. In order to achieve meaningful The second sources for this article are the accountability performance evidence must be documents published on the websites of govused for parliamentary scrutiny and conse-ernment departments and agencies, as well as quences must flow from non-performance. the House of Representatives, the Senate, the The research for the article is based on three parliamentary library and the Australian Nasources. First, there was an extensive review of tional Audit Office (ANAO). Presentation of the secondary literature of books, articles and performance information on the basis of proon- line material which describe and analyse the gram outputs and outcomes has been part of the role of parliament in the Australian political Australian budget, performance management system. Not surprisingly, there is disagreement and parliamentary accountability processes in this literature over how influential parlia-since 1984–85. There are now numerous ment can and should be in relation to the po-sources of information available to parliamenlitical executive of the prime minister and the tarians and over the years the presentation of Cabinet and with respect to the Australian pub-performance data and performance reports has lic service (APS) which contributes to policy been significantly refined. formation and is responsible for the efficient Two types of documents represent the cor- and effective implementation of programs. In nerstones of performance accountability to . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia 374 Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia December 2009 parliament: the several sets of estimates documents presented over the course of a year and the annual reports from departments and agencies which must be presented to parliament by October 31 of each year. Both the main estimates (Portfolio Budget Statements) and the supplementary estimates (Portfolio Additional Estimates Statements) originally had a narrow financial focus but over the past three decades there has been a shift to cover wider aspects of performance. Annual reports contain information on the performance of departments and agencies and present a narrative analysis of developments within various program fields over the previous year. Various types of parliamentary inquiries and questions, especially the estimates hearings before Senate committees, produce a huge volume of additional information. No one, especially busy parliamentarians, can be aware of and consult all of the multitudinous, varied and often complicated types of evidence on performance produced for and within parliament on an annual basis. Accordingly, this study was based on only a highly selective analysis of the actual estimates, annual reports, committee proceedings and other documents generated for the purposes of parliamentary accountability. To complement the necessarily limited document review, the author undertook elite, semi- structured interviews with a relatively small number of parliamentarians, parliamentary officials (particularly secretaries to parliamentary committees) and senior public servants who designed the performance reporting system and appear regularly before parliamentary committees. Consistent with the elite interviewing approach of qualitative research, no claim can be made as to the representativeness of the parliamentarians and other public officials consulted compared to the large, overall number of people involved in the wide ranging, complicated and highly dynamic processes of interaction among the numerous institutions and thousands of individuals comprising the accountability networks within the Australian parliament.1 Indeed, the 30 people interviewed for this study were selected precisely because they were atypical. By reason of their position and/or reputation they were expected to of fer more in-depth, reflective and insightful observations on the parliamentary accountability processes than would result from a more structured, random-sample survey of parliamentarians and other public officials. What is reported here, therefore, are the perceptions and opinions of a small group of respondents who have intimate knowledge of how accountability processes involving parliament, ministers and the APS operate in practice. The fact that interview respondents were involved with the parliamentary and bureaucratic processes under examination might involve the risk that they would ignore any problems involved, but in fact most respondents appeared to speak with candor. On the basis of preliminary, qualitative research of the type conducted for this article, we can begin to build the foundation for assessments of whether performance-based approaches to accountability are working in the ways intended. The performance-based model of accountability has become popular in many political systems where new approaches to public management have been introduced. The Commonwealth government could be considered a leader among countries in terms of the early adoption and the range of reforms made to the design of public organisations, the delivery of programs and services and the introduction of new mechanisms of internal and external accountability for the public service and increasingly for the third parties who deliver public programs. As with any major initiative there are different assessments of how well the reforms to public management have worked within government and what impact they have had on parliamentary accountability. Several parliamentarians and parliamentary staff suggested that the apparently low level of government support for performance measurement and more systematic in-depth evaluations of policies and programs have discouraged parliamentarians from conducting serious oversight activities because they believe such work would have no impact. This point is examined in greater detail later in this article. One of the issues arising from management reform is the congruence between the new structures, processes and cultures of performance within government and the traditional C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia Thomas 375 principles, practices and cultures of parliamentary accountability based upon collective and individual ministerial responsibility and the presumed anonymity and neutrality of the public service. The new approaches implied for some observers that ministers would continue to answer for outcomes, but that public servants would become more accountable before parliament for inputs and outputs. Several respondents declared that it is far from clear in practice where ministerial responsibility ends and administrative accountability begins. Traditional parliamentary approaches to the enforcement of ministerial responsibility focus mainly on blaming governments and individual ministers for abuses, mistakes or simply unforeseen problems. These processes are mainly adversarial, theatrical and focused on the past. This can be contrasted with the newer thinking (and to a lesser extent, the practice) within governments and the bureaucracy of insisting that public organisations must demonstrate more foresight, responsiveness, innovation and prudent risk taking, while being granted more authority and freedom from rules and procedures and held more strictly accountable for results. In short, the negative blaming approach typically followed in parliament does not fit well with the more constructive, learning approach being promoted within the APS. The role of partisanship in parliament is controversial. For some commentators competition among parties provides the incentives and energy which drive the parliamentary process and ensure that the deficiencies in performance of governments are revealed. Critics see prevailing partisan approaches to the enforcement of political accountability as too ritualistic, narrow, negative and theatrical. It is argued that the prevailing adversarial approaches tend to exaggerate, magnify and distort the real challenges of public management and improved performance in modern government. Up to a point, parliament and some parliamentarians have adopted the rhetoric and the mechanisms of performance-based accountability. However, it remains an open question whether competitive political parties who dominate the proceedings of parliament, and individual members of parliament (MPs) and senators can drop for purpose of scrutiny of performance at least, the prevailing ‘gotcha’ approach to accountability. There is also the question of whether parliamentarians generally are prepared to do the difficult, time consuming and politically unglamorous work of trying to understand performance in all of its dimensions and contribute constructively to its improvements. Finally, there is the issue of the future relationship between the APS and parliament. Historically, the APS has been seen as neutral and anonymous, capable of serving successive governments. It was responsible ministers who were expected to take the credit or blame in parliament. The bureaucracy has also been seen by many parliamentarians as insular, unresponsive, inefficient and self-serving. In response to internal management reforms and external pressures to strengthen accountability, there is emerging within the parliamentary and public service forums more acceptance of the idea that senior public servants should be held directly and personally accountable before parliament and its committees for their leadership and management of departments and programs. How such a process of direct APS accountability will work in practice is not clear. Public servants regularly appear before parliamentary committees to provide information and to answer questions. Would a new model of APS accountability allow parliamentary committees to attach consequences in the form of rewards and punishments as a result of over and under performance of departments and programs' It should be noted that performance is not an objective reality, but rather it is a subjective value-laden phenomenon about which there is often disagreement, even beyond of the partisan world of parliament. Recent trends and developments in terms of the interactions between parliament and public service have created a certain amount of confusion and controversy about the aims and the rules of engagement for the performance accountability sessions which now regularly take place in parliament, particularly before the Senate committees which examine estimates. With these broader issues in mind, the article will proceed as follows. First, an overview of C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia 376 Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia December 2009 the place of parliament within the Australian political system will be presented. Identifying the wider context is necessary to any analysis of parliament’s efforts to achieve greater accountability based upon performance. Secondly, parliament’s use of performance reports, especially through the processes of committee hearings in the Senate, will be examined. Both the relevance and the quality of the information produced for parliament and the capacity, opportunity and willingness of parliamentarians to discuss performance in a meaningful and constructive manner, along with the opportunities for them to do so, will be assessed. Third, an overall evaluation of current parliamentary approaches to performance accountability is offered, with some brief observations on the future implications of recent trends. As with many other aspects of government, there is always both change and continuity in the intersecting and independent worlds of parliament and the APS. Therefore predictions about future developments should be made cautiously. Parliament in the Australian Political System Describing the place of parliament in the wider political system is complicated by the features which distinguish it from other cabinet- parliamentary models. The Australian parliament is a bicameral legislature consisting of the Crown, the House of Representatives, and the Senate. Both elected, but on different electoral systems, the two chambers have evolved to play different and controversial roles within the political system (for detailed treatments of Australian Parliament see Bach 2003a; Halligan, Miller and Power 2007; Uhr 1998). The House of Representatives is the confidence chamber. In theory it controls the fate of the prime minister and the cabinet by having the power to declare non-confidence in government at any time. In practice, the reverse is true with the prime minister exercising strict control over the house on the basis of party solidarity and party discipline. Only once since 1940 has there been a minority government situation in the House of Representatives and successive governments have invoked various versions of a mandate theory of parliamentary elections to insist that their task is to deliver on their general and specific promises to the electorate rather than to compromise with the opposition (see Goot 1999, 2000). Ritualistic, largely negative and often theatrical adversarialism characterises the proceedings of the full House of Representatives and only to a slightly lesser extent those of its parliamentary committees. More influential than the house and its committees are the private meetings of the governing party, although even in those settings it requires a fortuitous combination of circumstances for backbench opinion to change the course of a determined prime minister and cabinet. Defenders of the House of Representatives against the charge that it has become subservient to the government, insist that it plays a subtle, indirect role of curbing executive power because the prime minister and other ministers shape legislative and budgetary proposals to avoid a backlash from their backbench followers. Proving the operation of this rule of anticipated reactions is difficult, if not impossible, since we are dealing with something that did not happen. Nevertheless it is plausible to assume that ministers from time to time take into account how the caucus of the governing party will react. Apart from being the other half of parliament, the Senate is a very different institution from the House of Representatives. The Senate was conceived as a body to defend the interests of state societies (not state governments) in relation to national policy matters. Therefore, the states would be equally represented in the upper house regardless of their population. The Senate was the first popularly elected upper house in any parliamentary system based on the Westminster model. However, it was initially regarded as a weak institution. Elected on much the same basis as the House of Representatives, the partisan composition of the Senate resembled that of the house and critics complained that senators put party loyalty ahead of defending the interests of their states. This meant that the government controlled the Senate in the same way that it controlled the House of Representatives. C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia Thomas 377 The dynamics of cabinet-parliamentary government changed in 1949 when a system of proportional representation was adopted for the election of senators. Over time, government majorities in the Senate became relatively rare and tensions developed between the Senate and the House. Only the House of Representatives can force governments from office by a vote of no-confidence, but the Senate can cause embarrassment and serious political difficulty for a government by withholding approval for legislation and spending. Elected for six year terms on a party list basis, senators are able to devote time to investigative activities because they are freer of electoral pressures than MPs. The evolution of the Australian parliamentary structures has led to tensions and conflicts. Sharman (1990:1) has described such structures as ‘defective and without coherent justification’. The problem, he observed, is that majoritarian (House of Representatives) and consensual (the Senate) democracy co-exist within the political system and this has produced constitutional crises and double dissolutions to resolve deadlocks between the two houses of parliament, each with a claim to being more representative of the public will than the other. In contrast, Bach (a legislative scholar from the United States) sees the continuing tensions and occasional clashes as a price worth paying to ensure a healthy democracy in which a powerful political executive is forced to mobilise support for its legislation and to explain before parliament how it has exercised public power (Bach 2003a, 2003b). With its strict party discipline, the House of Representatives exists to support strong governments capable of enacting most or all of their legislation. With its non-government majority, but equally strict party solidarity and discipline, the Senate provides for checks and balances and for greater democratic accountability for the performance of policies and programs. Disagreements among scholars have been mirrored by political debates within parliament, the media and among the interested public. Faced with a recalcitrant Senate, various governments have proposed to limit what are seen to be the obstructionist tendencies of opposition senators. However, the public seems to accept that al most by accident the Australian political system has arrived at a desirable delicate balance between executive power and parliamentary accountability. In June 2005 when the interviews for this study were undertaken, the Liberal-National coalition government of Prime Minister John Howard was about to obtain (on 1 July 2005 when the new Senate term began) a one seat majority in the Senate. This was the first time since 1981 that the governing party in the House of Representatives also had a majority in the Senate, meaning that in principle it did not have to negotiate with other parties to secure the passage of its legislation and could restrict the inquiry activity within Senate committees. At the time Howard insisted that he would not abuse his new control. Similarly, the Leader of the Government in the Senate insisted that legislation would still undergo rigorous review and that estimates hearings before Senate committees continue. However, Senator Chris Evans, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, would charge the Howard government with using the tyranny of the majority to block careful legislative review of government bills and proposed controversial inquiries by Senate committees. The Australian Democrats, a minor party which has frequently played a mediating role in the Senate, also accuses the Howard government of refusing to answer questions and weakening the scrutiny role of Senate committees.2 More is said about this controversy later in the paper. Awareness of these wider institutional relationships and controversies is necessary to understand the complicated and evolving dynamics of interaction inside parliament (including the two houses and the several political parties who dominate its proceedings), the government and the APS. The controversies over the place of parliament in the policy-making process have focused mainly on its capacity to reject, modify or delay legislation and spending proposed by the government. The general complaint is that the House of Representatives is too docile and accepting of government leadership, whereas at times the Senate is too aggressive and obstructionist in relation to law making and withholding the approval of spending. However, the focus here is on the function of C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia 378 Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia December 2009 parliament in conducting scrutiny of the actions and inactions of ministers and public servants based upon the growing volume of documents on performance produced within government and released to parliament and the public. In moving to analyse how the scrutiny function of parliament is performed in practice, it must be acknowledged that in the real world the multiple functions of representation, lawmaking, reviews of spending, and enforcing accountability, cannot be neatly separated. A particular activity conducted within parliament can serve more than one function. For example, in reviewing bills, parliament or more likely its committees, might anticipate the requirements for reporting on performance once new or modified programs are fully operational. The function of providing scrutiny of the APS and its performance has only come to the forefront of thinking about the role of parliament over the past three decades and most of the actual activity in relation to this function takes place within the Senate. Finally, it must be noted that parliament is not a unified institution. It is dominated by the competition among political parties, but there can be rivalries and tensions within parties and many agendas are being pursued by individual parliamentarians. Purposes of Parliamentary Scrutiny The relative newness of the scrutiny function of administrative performance and the somewhat ad hoc way in which the function has developed in practice, means there is nothing like a fully developed theory of why and how parliament should conduct its efforts at providing surveillance of the performance of ministers, departments, non-departmental bodies and the individuals who provide leadership and management in those institutions. Even with the growth of the scrutiny function in recent decades, there remains controversy about the constitutional appropriateness of such parliamentary activities and their effectiveness in holding ministers and public officials accountable for performance. The first obstacle involves controversy over who answers for performance – ministers or senior public servants. Both constitutional tra dition and the statutes which bring public organisations into existence suggest that responsible ministers are in charge and/or ultimately answerable before parliament for performance. The APS is only indirectly accountable to parliament, through the communication channel of responsible ministers. In theory, public servants are expected to be professionals who provide policy advice in private and carry out policy to the best of their ability. Discipline of public servants who misuse their authority, commit major blunders or are seriously deficient in their performance as leaders and managers, is handled as an internal matter. In short, the conventions of ministerial responsibility and the related notions of public service anonymity and confidentiality have historically provided a protective shield against extensive parliamentary inquiries into the internal operations of public sector organisations. Under the pressure of trends and developments both outside and inside of government, there have been more discussions of the need to rethink the implicit bargain between ministers, senior public servants and parliamentarians about who will be held accountable for what and how that accountability will be enforced. A second reason that the scrutiny function was slow to develop and may not have fulfilled its potential, is the unwillingness of governments, regardless of which party was in office, to encourage and to support parliament and its committees in its efforts to examine performance and administrative matters. Even during those periods when there is a government majority in the Senate, committees have not been encouraged to pursue investigations which might even inadvertently prove embarrassing. When the government lacks control of the Senate and its committees, there is the fear that the opposition senators will take the maximum political advantage of any deficiencies in performance to detract from the reputation of the governing party. A third obstacle arises from the difficult nature of the scrutiny work, often its low profile nature and therefore the lack of political rewards for parliamentarians who commit to the task in a serious and constructive manner. There is also the fact that parliamentary C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia Thomas 379 committees cannot force governments to act on reports dealing with deficiencies in departments and/or agencies and individual programs. This refusal to act or even to respond meaningfully to such reports can produce a sense of futility among parliamentarians, especially those from the opposition parties. Finally, parliament is first and foremost a political body, which provides a forum for continuing clashes between competitive political parties over philosophy, policy and program management. Parliament and its committees will never resemble, as some reformers would like them to, a continuous evaluation seminar in which parliamentarians search diligently for objective evidence and always seek to contribute constructively to improved performance. Most parliamentarians lack in-depth policy and managerial knowledge when first elected. Over time, if re-elected, they can develop expertise to the point of becoming enlightened amateurs or better, but given the other demands of parliamentary life they face a serious challenge in maintaining current knowledge about policy and management issues. Performance reports prepared within departments and agencies may not themselves always be objective, balanced and comprehensive, but once they arrive in the highly political forum of parliament there is the real possibility that the findings will be used to score political points and as a consequence deficiencies in performance will be magnified, distorted and amplified through the subsequent media coverage. This dynamic produces a mutual wariness between parliamentarians and public servants: parliamentarians suspect that the bureaucracy will not admit mistakes and problems, while senior public servants fear embarrassing their ministers, becoming entangled in partisan controversies and seeing their professional reputations tarnished by political gamesmanship. Contributing to the controversy over the scrutiny function are disagreements about its primary and secondary purposes. The historical and most visible purpose of parliamentary scrutiny is to hold responsible ministers accountable for the effective and efficient implementation of the laws approved by parliaments. The reluctance of prime ministers to dismiss or demote ministers associated with policy blunders or administrative mistakes, has contributed to the emergence of the notion of a separate domain of managerial accountability for senior public servants. The appropriateness and implications of substituting or supplementing traditional ministerial responsibility with direct managerial accountability to parliament is too wide and speculative a topic to be addressed here. However, the emergence of the performance reporting movement is partly based on drawing a line between these two types of accountability. In addition to promoting accountability for both elected ministers and appointed public servants, parliamentary scrutiny is also intended to ensure that laws are being implemented as parliament intended. As the public sector expanded during the 20th century, parliament was forced to pass laws in very general language and it was left to the bureaucracy to refine and to carry out the statutory purposes. On the basis of such delegated legislative authority enormous discretion is granted to departments and/or agencies to formulate and to apply regulations of various kinds. Technically regulation is done in the minister’s name, but public servants are responsible for implementation and enforcement. The vast scope of administrative law making and its direct impact on the lives of Australians means that in quantitative terms at least public servants have become the real law makers. There is a Senate committee on regulation and ordinances which supervises the exercise of delegated law making, but there are limits to its effectiveness in terms of the time, expertise and commitments of its members. This is one of the reasons why during the 1970s and 1980s Australian governments and parliament enacted a series of administrative law reforms, which involved the creation of auxiliary agencies to assure parliament and citizens that misuses of ministerial and bureaucratic authority would be prevented and corrected (see Creyke and McMillan 1998). The tabling of performance documents in parliament and the various hearings conducted by committees also provide opportunities for parliamentarians to discover and deal with C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia 380 Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia December 2009 potential abuses of discretionary authority. At times parliamentarians will be asking questions based upon contacts with people and organisations who have encountered difficulty dealing with the bureaucracy. The official purpose of parliamentary examination of the estimates and annual reports is to promote value for money in public spending, to ensure economy, efficiency and effectiveness in public programs and to discover waste and mismanagement so that they can be eliminated. There is both a prospective and retrospective aspect to the process of parliamentary review of the finances and management of the APS and the programs it operates. The review and approval of the estimates of spending is intended mainly to deal with the future, whereas the annual reports are designed to enable parliament to make an informed judgment on the past year’s performance of departments and agencies, although future year performance targets can be involved in this process. A crucial source of commentary on past spending and associated management issues are the annual reports and special studies produced by the ANAO. It should be stressed, however, that the distinction between the future and the past used to structure the content of the main performance documents does not operate so clearly in the swirling scrutiny process in which parliamentarians jump forward and back in time in their questioning. The multiple and diverse perspectives represented in parliament makes its scrutiny efforts seem unfocused and undisciplined. However, the random and unpredictable nature of parliamentary investigations based upon the estimates and annual reports may contribute in an almost accidental way more to parliamentary scrutiny than is popularly appreciated because ministers and senior public servants cannot come to hearings with totally prepared responses. Review of the Estimates – The House of Representatives The review of estimates has become predominantly a task for the Senate, one performed mainly through a system of eight standing committees. Therefore, the limited role of the House of Representatives will be discussed briefly, before the main analysis of the work of Senate estimates committees is presented. In theory, the House of Representatives should be the dominant chamber in terms of legal and political control over the finances of government. Section 53 of the Australian Constitution provides that taxing and spending bills must begin their parliamentary passage in the House of Representatives and the Senate is prohibited from amending such bills. However, the Senate may request the house to make such amendments. In political terms, the revenue and expenditure budget items are considered confidence matters so that governments have insisted on strict party discipline on budget matters. The budget is presented by the Treasurer with the introduction of three appropriation bills.3 Bill No. 1, main appropriations covers continuing expenditures. Bill No. 2 covers expenditures for new policies, new capital expenditures and grants to the state governments. A third bill provides the money for the departments of parliament. The debate on the second reading of the Appropriation Bill, No. 1 is known as the Budget debate. It is wide ranging, highly partisan and is concluded before the start of the financial year on July 1. The opposition uses the debate to declare no-confidence in the government’s economic and financial policies, but motions and amendments to this effect are never successful. There is little actual examination of the estimates documents involved with the Budget debate which takes place in the full House operating as the Main Committee in which the rules of debate are relaxed to allow for the maximum political debate to take place. Between 1979 and 1981, the House experimented with a number of estimates committees to allow for some actual scrutiny of spending, but for a number of reasons these committees were dropped (see HRSCP 2003 for an account of the demise of these committees). In 2003, a House committee recommended that estimates be referred to the appropriate standing committees and that hearings be held for those departments where the minister was a member of the C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia Thomas 381 House of Representatives. The government of the day refused to act on this proposal. As a consequence, the supply process in the House of Representatives represents essentially an opportunity for the government to boast and confess in public about its economic and fiscal policy (taxing and spending) decisions in front of a usually critical audience of opposition parties. Budget debates can in theory cover financial details and department activity, but they are seldom used for these narrow purposes. Part of the reason why the House has abandoned almost any pretence of reviewing government spending in detail is the role of the Senate estimates process. Senators and parliamentary officials take great pride in the general role of the Senate in holding the executive accountable and in the specific role that Senate committees play in overseeing the finances of government. The Senate and Scrutiny of Finances and Administration During the 1980s and the 1990s the Senate emerged as a significant check on the power of governments to pass legislation unimpeded and on their ability to escape scrutiny of the operation of public programs. Regardless of the party in office, governments expressed resentment about the growing power of the Senate. Most recently, the controversy has been about the steps taken by the Howard government to curtail the capacity of the Senate to frustrate and to embarrass his government. However, earlier a Labor Prime Minister, Paul Keating, colourfully called senators ‘unrepresentative swill’ when arguing that the Senate had contributed nothing to good government in Australia. The performance of the Senate in the legislative review and scrutiny of administration functions is concentrated in its committee system. The modern committee system emerged in June 1970 with the creation of a number of legislative and general purpose committees. Over the initial two decades, the work of the Senate committees evolved incrementally, but beginning in the 1990s the system took on greater importance as a means of holding the executive accountable. Three key functions for committees emerged: • the study of bills in greater depth and the provision for public involvement in that process; • the conduct of general inquiries into policy and program issues through references from the Senate; and • the review of the estimates and the annual reports on the performance of departments and agencies.4 Under a 1994 set of reforms, 16 standing committees were established with a pair of committees covering each broad subject field. Half of these committees provided scrutiny of legislation and spending. These committees had six members, with a government chair and a government majority. The other eight committees conducted inquiries based on references from the full Senate. In contrast to the legislation committees, the reference committees had an opposition majority and an opposition chair, which gave them more freedom from government control. As of 1 July 2005, the Howard government achieved a one seat majority in the Senate and its critics allege that it has attempted to rein in the committee process. On 20 June 2006 the Leader of the Government in the Senate proposed a reduction in the number of committees from 16 to 10, with the removal of the references committees.5 According to the government this streamlining would reduce unnecessary duplication arising from having two committees covering each of the eight ministerial portfolio areas. Furthermore, with the addition of two new portfolio areas (bringing the total number of committees to 10), the government argued that the scope of committee work would be broadened. Membership and chairing of the revised committee system would reflect the government majority position, meaning government senators would chair committees. The government insisted it continued to support the role of the Senate as a house of review and scrutiny. Not surprisingly, the opposition parties in the Senate saw things differently. The Leader of C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia 382 Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia December 2009 the Opposition asserted that the change would ‘emasculate the Senate committee system – the key accountability instrument in the Australian parliament’ with the move representing ‘a nail in the coffin in the Senate’s capacity to hold government to account’.6 After study by a procedure committee (SPC 2006) the merger of the legislative and reference committees was passed by a government majority. The proposal for two new committees was not approved so the final outcome in September 2006 was a reduction from 16 to eight Senate committees, with a government majority in each committee. Based upon past history, it seems safe to predict that the reduced number of committees will have its greatest impact on the capacity of the Senate to conduct freewheeling inquiries into sensitive issues of public policy. Regardless of the party in power, governments have sought to restrict such inquiries in the past. Review of bills and scrutiny of administration will still take place in Senate committees, but the opportunity to link such activities, as has been done in the past, to the inquiry process will be curtailed. Often hearings on the estimates and annual reports have reflected prior Senate inquires or led to calls for such inquiries. Information and Opportunity: Estimates Documents and Senate Estimates Hearings Parliament meets for approximately 60– 70 days annually, with blocks of sittings in February-March, May-June, August- September, October-November. Senate committee hearings on estimates and annual reports are conducted over two week periods in May in connection with the main estimates and in October in connection with the supplementary estimates. Annual reports from departments must to be tabled by the end of October, but they can be used as a basis for questioning throughout the year. Under the rules of the Senate only four estimates committees can meet at once and they may only sit when the full Senate is not in session. In 2005, the rules of the Senate were amended to reduce from 10 to eight, the number of sitting days for estimates hear ings during the May round, with nine sitting days in October. Depending upon the size of the portfolio departments or agency, the examination of estimates can consume between 40 and 60 hours, with committees conducting 10 hours of hearings in a single day at times. The compressed schedule for estimates hearings and the pressures of other parliamentary duties means that attendance at hearings can be low, with a few senators dominating the questioning. The fact that senators and their staff can follow proceedings of committees from their offices via the parliamentary channel contributes to low attendance. Notices of the hearings and the departments to be covered are posted in newspapers and the more controversial hearings generate both better attendance and often media coverage. The potential benefits of the estimates committees are widely recognised and often praised by parliamentary officials: • they provide senators with the opportunity to challenge ministers on the operation of their departments and programs; • the actual program managers can be questioned directly rather than having questions put through ministers and/or on the notice paper which often leads to delays; • portfolio budget statements (to be discussed later) provide a helpful guide to program administration; and • non-departmental bodies are included within the scope of estimates review. Whether these benefits are realised in practice is controversial and there is no shortage of critics who insist that the estimates committees have not lived up to their potential. The estimates process, along with other parliamentary inquiries, have brought senior public servants far more frequently before parliamentary committees of all kinds. This has meant some loss of their traditional anonymity, which was never complete of course. In a government town like Canberra, there was always a certain amount of intersection between the political and administrative worlds. Today, however, senior public servants have become recognised public figures, not in the sense that they C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia Thomas 383 are household names, but rather in the sense that parliamentarians, parliamentary staff and the media representatives in the press gallery have come to know the institutional affiliation and backgrounds of leading public servants, as well as their perspectives on some issues. The risks for public servants in spending more time before parliamentary committees are numerous. They are required to combine loyalty to the minister and the government with full and honest disclosure to parliament, to avoid identification with the policy positions of the governing party not to become entangled in partisan controversies and to protect the reputation of their departments and their own professional reputations. Public servants are trained to go before parliamentary committees in the form of sessions run by senior executives. There are rules of engagement for both parliamentarians and public servants which are supposed to govern occasions like estimate hearings, but such rules are fair weather devices, which tend to be ignored when political storms erupt. One senator interviewed for the study expressed sympathy for public service witnesses: ‘When the committees become political, it becomes very hard for public servants to know what measures of performance and accountability they must meet’ (Senator #7). Another senator suggested that public servants had to learn to cope: ‘The estimates committees are political. If appearing before them represents an uncomfortable experience for public servants that is tough, but that is how it is’ (Senator #4). Most parliamentarians interviewed for this study confirmed that the majority of senior public servants navigated skillfully in the potentially dangerous parliamentary waters. The parliamentarians generally praised public servants for answering most questions competently and immediately. A selective reading of the Senate committee hearings confirmed that on most occasions public servants were responsive and forthcoming in their answers to questions and concerns expressed by senators. Having said this, it must be added that senators often may not know which areas of performance are deficient and should be probed. The estimates hearings process has become time consuming for the bureaucracy. In a 2004 speech, Peter Shergold, Secretary, Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, noted that: ‘over the last eight years (1992–2000), an average of 3,000 public servants have been required to give evidence for more than 500 hours, providing copy for well over 6000 pages of Hansard’ (Shergold 2004). These statistics do not take into account the time which goes into the preparation of the documents for the hearings, the rows of public servants who observe the proceedings, ready to assist their superiors, and those in the back office who run the machinery to generate answers to questions which had not been anticipated. It was Shergold’s impression that the complexity of those questions had been increasing. The process of parliamentary accountability, he observed, may serve a noble cause, but in no way could it be described as costless. The costs involved are both direct and tangible (money and staff time), but they are also potentially intangible in both positive ways (eg, galvanising the norms of responsible financial behaviour) and negative ways (eg, contributing to a risk averse culture). Ostensibly, the estimates hearings are meant to deal with financial matters and at times the chairs of committees try to follow this principle strictly. However, a selective review of the printed proceedings of three committees during the May 2005 round of estimates, revealed great diversity and unpredictability in the questioning. Questions ranged from major public policy and public management issues to detailed, relatively minor (in financial terms at least) matters of administrative practice, decisions or purchases by departments. A widely recognised type of senator is the economy hawk who flies over millions of dollars in expenditures in favour of swooping down on the much smaller morsels of spending which might reflect abuse or mismanagement. Such questions often seem intended to attract media attention and secure gratitude from voters. When asked about this pattern, a senator interviewed for this study observed that ‘following the maxim that where there is smoke there is fire was a good practice’ because it kept ministers and the bureaucracy ‘on their toes’ (Senator #5). In C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia 384 Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia December 2009 addition to this ‘gotcha’ approach to financial accountability, there is also a small minority of senators who work inductively and systematically from the smaller budgetary items to some broader overall judgment about the probity, efficiency and effectiveness of departmental spending and operations. Over the past three decades there has been tension between the managerial reforms undertaken within the APS to promote efficiency and effectiveness and the continuing requirements for parliamentary accountability. Writing in 1989, Uhr observed that estimates committees were ‘divided and uncertain about the merits of reformed public management’ (Uhr 1989). In 1984 the government had adopted a broad policy field format for the presentation of the estimates to parliament. This format was intended to shift the focus from individual input items to the outputs and ideally the outcomes of program spending. Not only was this seen to be useful from an internal management viewpoint, it was also hoped that it would raise the sights of parliamentarians from ‘trivial’ matters (like equipment purchases or refurbishment of the prime minister’s residence) to the major issues of spending priorities and whether programs were delivering value for money. Initially, the estimates committees found the new format confusing and frustrating. Partly this was because for the first few years the line item estimates were retained and they did not match the program format used in the explanatory notes (about which more is said below). In addition, the eventual disappearance of the detailed information on inputs robbed opposition parliamentarians of the ammunition used to score political points against the government. It also frustrated a minority of parliamentarians who used the administrative details as conceptual handles by which to grasp the bigger and complicated problems of efficient and effective government. Finally, much of what interests parliamentarians is past spending, not future projections and eventual outcomes. The shift to outcomes raised questions about the worth of programs, a subjective judgment, which could be politically contentious, and therefore was not a focus that ministers and public servants would necessarily welcome. Having public servants, in addition to ministers, appear before the estimates committee was intended to supplement the factual detail contained in the appropriation bills with contextual information. By the late 1970s several estimates committees were calling for explanatory notes to guide and assist parliamentarians in understanding government finances and in questioning public officials. From the 1978 budget onward the Department of Finance undertook the development of a standardised format for explanatory notes for departmental and agency spending. After 1984 the program budget format for the notes was gradually adopted. As Uhr has observed, over the years Senate committees have praised the work of the Department of Finance and Administration in refining the documentation available to support spending requests.7 The current set of expenditure documents reflects the most recent thinking within the Department of Finance and Administration about how best to make budgetary choices and improve financial management. In 1999–2000, the government introduced an outcomes and output framework for budget presentation purposes, as well as accrual outcomes budgeting (AOB) to report on expenditures. The two methods were separate, but related parts of the public service reform and financial management improvement processes underway within the bureaucracy. The new framework designed to build on the budgeting arrangements of the 1980s. It was meant to focus on planned outcomes, not on means and processes. The official rhetoric has been that both the framework and the AOB would enhance transparency and accountability to parliament. In practice there have been implementation challenges and complaints from parliament that information crucial to meaningful accountability has gone missing. Many outcomes are very vague; ‘glittering generalities’ is how they were described by one senator interviewed for the study (Senator #7). For example, the number one outcome of the Environment and Heritage portfolio is to ensure that ‘the environment, especially those aspects that are matters of national significance, is protected and conserved’. C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia Thomas 385 In a 2000 report, shortly after the outcomes framework was introduced, the Senate’s Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee expressed concern over the widely varying levels of specificity in the Portfolio Budget Statements (PBS was the label attached to the replacement documents for the old explanatory notes) and the difficulty this posed for tracking progress (SSCFPA 2000). The committee also criticised the absorption of agencies and functions into broader frameworks. The high level of aggregation of financial data made it difficult to focus on departments and agencies in terms of their finances and performance. In response to the report, officials in Finance acknowledged that excessive aggregation was a problem. However, they noted that beyond certain minimum standards, departments and agencies were free to present as much information as they wanted and estimates committees could request that additional information be provided. Such requests have been made and departments/agencies have increased the information available in their PBS. In a follow-up report in March 2007, the Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration recommended that the quality of budget documents could be improved by better specification of outcomes, by including data for forward years at the output and the outcome level in the PBS documents and by the adoption of a common accounting standard across government (SSCFPA 2007). The committee also made recommendations to improve parliament’s scrutiny of proposed and actual expenditures, including the drafting of appropriation bills so that expenditures are expressed in outcome terms. Further discussion of these recommendations to strengthen parliamentary oversight of the financial and performance dimensions of government occurs later in this article. There has been a significant investment of money and staff time in restructuring costing and accounting systems to conform to the outcomes framework and in producing the PBS. Trying to serve internal management and external accountability purposes with the same set of documents has proven to be difficult in terms of conceptualisation, analysis and communication to audiences with different concerns and perspectives. What qualifies as quality information for financial decision-making and accountability will always be partly in the eye-ofthe beholder. The PBS remains one of the most important budget and performance documents. It is presented under the name of the minister, unlike annual reports (discussed below), which are presented in the name of the secretary of the department. As an official budget paper, the PBS is meant to provide the detailed information on outputs and outcomes required to support the more general appropriation bills. Once the budget is tabled, PBS become available on line. The typical PBS contains three sections: an introduction and guide to the use of the document; a portfolio overview; and a statement for each of the individual agencies contained within a particular portfolio. The PBS contains information on revenue authorised by appropriation bills, information on special appropriations, and performance information. Performance is defined as the proficiency of a department or agency in using resources economically, efficiently and effectively to achieve planned outcomes. Evidence on performance is meant to cover outputs and outcomes, factors that affect outcomes and actions that could improve outcomes. Departments and agencies are expected to indicate in their PBS how they will collect and report on performance and this information is to be included in their annual reports (ARs) where progress towards outcomes is recorded. Annual Reports (ARs) ARs represent a second key accountability document, along with the PBS. The Public Service Act 1999 requires secretaries of departments to provide their minister with an annual report for presentation to parliament. In other words, ARs are departmental documents, not ministerial documents like the PBS. At the beginning of the AR there is a statement from the secretary of the department. Depending upon the institution involved, reports are tabled either at C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia 386 Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia December 2009 the end of October or at the end of April and are referred to the appropriate parliamentary committees. While the ARs are available to the standing committees of the House of Representatives, little actual use is made of them in that forum. One MP interviewed for the study observed that ARs are ‘largely public relations exercises’ and most MPs apparently believe that the Senate committees are better equipped to review them (Representative #3). Probably many senators also see the ARs as intended to put the best possible light on departmental performance. Under the Standing Orders of the Senate, each committee is required to examine ARs and report to the Senate whether the report ‘is apparently satisfactory’ (Standing Order 25, 21). ARs deemed not to be satisfactory are to be the subject of more in-depth investigations and committees are expected to report on their deficiencies. Absent or late reports are also matters to be reported to the full Senate. If a committee so decides, the ARs will be examined in conjunction with the estimates. Committee reports on ARs are to be presented by the tenth sitting day of parliament in the New Year for reports tabled in October and by the tenth sitting day after 30 June for those tabled in April. ARs must be prepared in accordance with the Requirements for Departmental Annual Reports as approved by parliament’s Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit. ARs are intended to enable parliament to make an informed judgment on departmental performance. According to the official guide for the production of ARs, they should be ‘a balanced, candid account of both successes and shortcomings’. Descriptions of activities and outputs are to be minimised with the impacts and effectiveness of programs supposed to be the main focus. When possible, trend information covering more than just the past financial year is to be included. Although the focus is on the past year, future year performance targets can be included. If available, recent evaluation findings are also to be included. A summary table identifying the aggregate financial and staffing data for the past year is required. The reports were becoming long documents and there were complaints about the timeliness of the information they contained. In response, the Senate passed a resolution requiring that certain information, such as consulting contracts above a certain dollar amount, be placed on departmental websites (rather than in annual reports). Over time, the ARs have become more sophisticated in the presentation of performance information and one public servant in the Cabinet Secretariat suggested they were probably as refined as they could ever be. He also observed that the possibility of their use in parliament and by outside organisations was an incentive for departments and officials to tell the organisational story as fully and carefully as possible. The Australian Institute of Public Administration gives out awards for the best ARs and this recognition provides an incentive to improve their quality. There is disagreement over the quality and usefulness of the ARs which is not surprising given the different interests represented and agendas pursued in parliament (see Milazzo 1992; Ryan 1998). Departments have been instructed to keep the standards of production simple, cost-effective, devoid of jargon and focused mainly on telling the performance story in a clear, concise and balanced way. Often the ARs are simply updates of the previous year, using the same format and even the same words. Still, ARs offer parliamentarians useful contextual information, performance data for key results areas and indicators of future issues and directions. Typically, they are several hundred pages in length. Significant amounts of staff time and money go into their production. As noted below, parliamentary attention and direct use of the documents in committee hearings appears to be limited. Indicative of the concern that parliament was not paying sufficient attention to ARs, the Cabinet Secretariat in 1996 asked departments to report on the costs of production and the extent to which committees focused on material in the reports. Putting reports on departmental websites may have saved some costs in terms of printing and circulation, but as one senator observed, it remains ‘a great pity’ that ARs were not used more. ‘The problem’, he continued, ‘had more to do with the nature of parliament than with the design of documents’ (Senator #5). C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia Thomas 387 The Joint Committee of Public Accounts and Audit (JCPAA) and the Auditor General The JCPAA is one of only seven statutory committees (the Public Accounts and Audit Committee Act 1955) in parliament. All other committees are established by standing orders or resolutions. In broad terms, the JCPAA exists to review the performance of all departments and agencies supported by funds approved by parliament. The authority to consider and to report on the financial accounts of departments and/or agencies and to examine all reports of the Auditor General provides the committee with considerable independence from the government in terms of setting its own agenda. It also has matters referred to it by the House of Representatives and the Senate. The committee comprises of 10 representatives and six senators, with a majority of members from the governing party, a chairman from the governing party and a deputy chairman from the opposition. While the committee is authorised to hold private meetings, it conducts most of its business in public, takes testimony from expert witnesses from inside and outside of government, has briefings from the Auditor General (AG), and publishes its proceedings on its website. Its reports are tabled in parliament and it is able to make recommendations to government on both policy and administrative matters. The government is obliged to respond to these reports within six months of their presentation to parliament. As mentioned, the JCPAA also approves the format and content of the annual reports submitted by departments and agencies. The AG plays a crucial role in supporting the work of the JCPAA and there are several links between the two bodies. The AG is an independent officer of parliament whose duties are defined under the Auditor General Act 1997, which encourages a broad scope or comprehensive approach to the auditing and performance improvement function of the office. The AG is independent of both the political executive and parliament in the performance of his auditing duties. He is appointed by the Governor General for a 10 year term on the recommendation of the JCPAA and can only be removed by a resolution of both Houses of Parliament. The primary client of the office is parliament. The JCPAA approves the proposed budget of the office. This is largely a pro forma exercise and the real negotiations over funding of the office are with the government. Each year the JCPAA reviews the AG’s proposed audit program. Some 50-60 audit reports are produced annually by the AG and a review of all these reports by the JCPAA is required under the committee’s legislation. Access to the resources (a budget of over $50 million), staff capability (nearly 300 employees) and expertise (in house expertise being supplemented by outsourced private sector services) provides an enormous reservoir of knowledge, skills and information to the JCPAA and to other committees of parliament. While parliament is the primary client for the AG, the office sees itself as contributing to improved financial and performance management in all public sector entities. In a 2000 speech, the then Auditor General Pat Barrett, insisted his office did not follow the traditional gotcha mentality attributed to auditors, but rather took a client approach intended to support improvements in public management (Barrett 1999, 2004; McPhee 2008). He identified the main products of his office as financial statement audits, performance audits that evaluate the economy, efficiency and effectiveness of programs and best practice guides (BPG’s) designed to enable departments and/or agencies to improve their practices and performance. BPGs have been developed on the broad topic of accountability to parliament, including guidance on the contents of PBS and AR documents. To assist parliament, the AG has also prepared documents on emerging challenges to accountability like contracting out, public/private partnerships, corporate governance and risk management. The main relationship of the AG with parliament is through the JCPAA, but its financial and performance audits also assist the work of other parliamentary committees, especially the Senate estimates committees. Audit opinions provide clues as to problem areas where questions need to be asked. Secretaries to the committees receive advance notice of forthcoming C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia 388 Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia December 2009 reports from the AG, which allows them to plan with the chairman of the committee the focus for estimates hearings. The ANAO office audits financial statements in the annual reports of departments/agencies in order to provide the assurance (or otherwise) to the committees as to the accuracy and propriety of financial operations. On a growing number of occasions, staff from the AG have been called to testify before estimates and other parliamentary committees especially in regard to the ANAO performance audits. Assessing the Scrutiny Efforts of Parliamentary Committees Describing the structures and procedures for parliamentary scrutiny of bureaucratic performance is easier than characterising how that function is carried out in practice. Assessing the cumulative impact of parliament’s oversight activities on the thinking and behaviour of the political executive and the APS is even more difficult. And, finally, the degree to which parliamentary scrutiny contributes to improved performance by government is probably impossible to know with certainty. Having acknowledged the difficulties, a good place to start such an assessment is the recognition that the Senate takes the function of scrutiny very seriously. The idea of the Senate as a house of review for both legislation and spending has over time become entrenched in the culture of the institution. Senators and parliamentary officials, like the Clerk of the Senate, take great pride in the perceived role of the Senate in holding the executive to account and in preventing potential abuses of authority by either elected or appointed officials. There may be an element of mythology and self-congratulation in the representation of the Senate as the protector of Australian democracy but such images of the institution are significant components of the internal culture of the Senate to which members become attached over time (see Coates 1992). As one senator observed in his interview: ‘There is a corporate view around here that the review role of the Senate has to be preserved’ (Senator #4). As a consequence, taking the review function seriously becomes one of the norms of behavior which a significant number of senators feel compelled to follow even though there are potentially greater political rewards to be gained from more high-profile activities than spending time in the relative obscurity of a committee room trying to decipher the mystery of a PBS or the significance of performance data in an annual report. In contrast in the Canadian parliament, committees in the House of Commons and in the (appointed) Senate spend almost no time in actually examining the estimates or in reviewing performance plans and performance reports. In short, the Australian Senate is probably entitled to claim that among western democratic legislative bodies it takes the oversight function more seriously than any other, with the possible exception of the Senate in the United States. Further evidence of the Senate’s commitment to the review function is the investment it makes in its operation in general and its committee system in particular. Like other parts of government, the two houses of parliament are required to publish annual reports on their performance and parliamentary officials must appear before a parliamentary committee to answer questions about either the operations of the House of Representatives or the Senate. These annual reports contain a great deal of useful information on the organisation, activities and performance of the parliamentary bureaucracy. Only the main elements of the work of the Senate staff in support of the estimates and annual reports processes can be described in the space available here. The information is taken from the Senate’s annual reports for 2004–05, and for 2006–07. In 2004– 05 the committee office supported eight legislative committees and eight references committees. Legislation committees consider bills, estimates and annual reports, while references committees conduct inquiries. The restructuring of the committee system which occurred in September 2006 led to a shift away from inquiries with more committee time spent on the examination of bills. In his statement introducing the 2006–07 annual report of the Senate Department, the Clerk of the Senate C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia Thomas 389 observed that the trend away from inquiries increased the importance as accountability forums of the estimates hearings conducted by the committees. To support these committees the committee office had a budget of $8.8 million ($4.8 million for staffing and $4.0 million for administration) and employed 58 staff in 2003–04. By 2006–07 this budget had risen to $9.4 million and there were 150 employees.8 The key staff in terms of providing procedural and strategic advice to the chairmen and other members of Senate committees are the 13 secretaries to the committees. All secretaries are university graduates, many with advanced degrees. Often they are supported by an assistant secretary, research officer and an administrative assistant. Surveys are done every two years to determine the satisfaction of senators with the services provided by the committees office and in 2005, 95% rated the service as very satisfactory (49%) or satisfactory (46%). In 2007 the overall satisfaction rate reached 100%.9 Back in 2004–05, the committee office supported 536 committee meetings. Comparisons to 2006–07 are difficult because of the changes to the committee system which took place on 11 September 2006. In the period from 11 September 2006 to 30 June 2007 the streamlined committee system held 499 meetings. The time spent in committees examining bills and estimates (but not annual reports) is broken out separately. In 2004–05, just over 500 hours were spent on estimates and over 3,000 witnesses were heard, whereas in 2006–07 over 700 hours were spent on estimates, and over 4,000 witnesses were heard.10 Controlling the costs of operations of both houses of parliament was an issue raised during the May 2005 estimates hearings of the Senate Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee when the Clerk of the Senate and the Secretary to the Department of Parliamentary Services appeared. In 2003–04, the House of Representatives spent $13.6 million on 78 full-time staff, administrative and travel expenses to support its committee operations. In addition to these direct expenditures on the committee systems of the two houses, funds are provided for personal staff to parliamentar ians (usually three for each MP or senator), to support the research branch of the library and to hire outside consultants in connection with more specialised inquires conducted by committees in both houses (see Jones 2006 for an historical and general discussion). In summary, this constitutes is a significant investment in the capacity of parliament to oversee the performance of the executive, but it is dwarfed in size and depth of expertise by the huge repository of specialised knowledge and expert advice represented by the APS which exists primarily to serve the government. Whether these investments in parliamentary capacity pay off in terms of more thorough investigations and increased impacts on government operations is a subjective judgment for which the evidence is not readily available. Providing an overall characterisation of the hearings on estimates and annual reports is difficult because the proceedings are wide ranging and largely unstructured. There is usually a minister present at estimate hearings, at least at the beginning, but the minister is often a stand-in for a cabinet colleague who serves in the House of Representatives. This means that the proxy minister cannot give as full an answer as the real minister might and more questions might be taken as notice or passed along to public servants to answer. Senators can also place written questions with the secretaries to the committees, who then distribute them to other committee members and to the relevant departments and agencies. A deadline of 30 days is set for the filing of responses to questions, after which a notice of unanswered questions is posted, but even this slight embarrassment has not caused the government to be punctual in filing responses. By some estimates, as many as 60% of questions go unanswered or the government responds that it would be too expensive to provide a detailed answer. In this opening statement to the 2006– 07 annual report of the Senate Department, the Clerk observed that the refusal by ministers to answer questions and to provide information to committees was a growing problem. Estimates hearings, he argues, were the best opportunity to put pressure on ministers and public servants to supply information.11 C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia 390 Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia December 2009 The questioning during the estimates hearings is wide ranging, reflecting the fact that the hearings serve a number of purposes and senators approach the task of reviewing the estimates with a number of different agendas in mind. Not surprisingly, there is an overriding political orientation by opposition senators who pose the majority of questions. Often they are looking to score political points against the government by attacking its policies or by digging up skeletons of alleged past misdeeds. It would be na¨ive to expect senators to approach the review of estimates and annual reports as an objective search for the truth about performance and how it might be improved. Seeing the world in political and partisan terms is a requirement of the job of parliamentarians. It is also the case that defining and measuring successful performance is a value-laden process about which people can legitimately disagree so not all of the partisan exchanges should be seen as a contrived process intended simply to score political points. A minority of the questions in the committees refer to the financial information in the estimates or to the performance data presented in the annual reports. A long-serving senator interviewed for this study observed that ‘less than 25% of the questions asked in the committees actually deal with the estimates or the performance data which is found in PBS and AR documents’ (Senator #7). Despite the new formats for the presentation of financial and performance data, questions about specific items of expenditure, which may imply extravagance and/or generate media coverage, remain popular. In the course of the hearing on the defense budget a question was asked concerning whether the department had paid for a cake at a farewell party for an employee, according to one senator interviewed for this study (Senator #2). Such a question might be seen as political gamesmanship, but the questioner would probably insist he was defending the public’s right to probity in spending, even when the amounts are small. The randomness of the questioning can prove frustrating for APS witnesses as happened in a 3 June 2005 hearing of the Senate’s Employment Workplace Relations and Education Legislation Committee, when Senator George Campbell asked about the number of seminars held on new workplace legislation, attendance at them and their total cost. Finn Pratt, Deputy Secretary, Workplace Relations in the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations offered to obtain the information on the number of seminars, but stated that obtaining costing information would take more time. His response provoked the following exchange with a clearly exasperated Senator Campbell: Senator Campbell – We did give you notice that we would be asking questions in this specific area. I assumed that you would have done your homework before you come here. Mr. Pratt – We certainly attempt to prepare as well as possible to aid the committee in its inquiries. There is an enormous range, though, of questions that you can ask and we cannot anticipate them all. Senator Campbell – I thought a lot of these would have been fairly typical. Mr. Pratt – The number of seminars' That is a little bit from left field. The exchange reflects the frustration of senators when questions are posed, taken on notice by departmental officials and not answered until long after the estimates have been approved. Some departments have sought to improve their interactions with Senate committees by consulting committee secretaries in advance about what topics are likely to be raised and some conduct dress rehearsals of the hearing process to better identify potential controversies. Given the diverse and shifting interests of senators, it is impossible for departments to be prepared for all questions. The purpose of detailed, specific questions is not always obvious, although at times senators are conducting a fishing expedition in which they hope to catch the minister and/or the department with some embarrassing revelation. A number of senators interviewed for this study, as well as secretaries to Senate committees, indicated that there was now more focus on policy and program issues than in earlier decades. A senator with 16 years attributed this to the revised formats of information provision C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia Thomas 391 (refined PBS and AR documents) and all of the talk in government circles about a performance based model of accountability: When I first came here a lot of questions were asked in estimates about tea ladies, indoor plants and paper clips. Today, because of the presentation of the budget in the program format, there are more questions which go to purposes and outcomes(Senator #6). The designers of the new financial management systems in Finance and the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet had hoped in the 1980s that the adoption of the program budget format would gradually raise the sights of parliamentarians from ‘administrivia’ to the broader issues of the efficiency and effectiveness of spending and programs. This appears to have happened, although this is clearly an impressionistic observation. Probably a contributing factor to the greater interest in performance matters has been the growing availability of performance audits over the past two decades from the ANAO and the willingness of the professional staff of that office to work with the subject matter committees of both houses. Even if parliamentarians do not take full advantage of the mountainous volumes of performance information made available to them, the language of outputs and outcomes has become part of the culture of parliament and more attention is being paid to the effectiveness of policies and programs.12 An unforeseen consequence of the greater focus on policy and program issues seems to have been greater partisan divisions within committees, leading in turn to more minority reports, as is discussed below. The extent to which committees are dominated by partisanship and by politically motivated questioning varies. For example, the Senate’s Finance and Public Administration Committee has within its scope the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet (PM&C), which is a popular target of opposition attacks. A major focus of questioning in this committee is the alleged interference of the PM&C in matters which are meant to be independent. For example, during the October 2005 estimates hearings questions were asked about PM&C interference in the Palmer inquiry into the case of immigration detention and into the work of the Welfare Reform Taskforce. Total spending on government advertising controlled by the centre of government was another focus of a series of questions. The committee also featured many examples of questions about the details of spending which might prove embarrassing to the Howard government. Examples were: the cost of the prime minister’s stay at London’s Claridges Hotel; maintenance costs of Kirribelli House (the prime minister’s second residence in Sydney); political patronage in appointments; and the cost to Australians of a wedding present to the Prince of Wales and the Duchess of Cornwall. In the context of overall spending, each of these items involved a small amount of expenditure but the perceived political value to the opposition senators raising the questions was obviously high. Defenders of such questions would argue that exposure of misspending, extravagance or personal indulgence is part of the job of senators on behalf of the public and that small misdeeds could be a sign of bigger problems. The hearings of this committee frequently attract media attention, which gives senators another incentive to play to the grandstands in the content and tone of their questions. Another pattern is for senators to pick up politically sensitive topics which are already in the news. For example, in the review of the estimates for 2005–06, the Senate’s Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Legislation Committee spent an entire day on the Telstra T3 issue, a proposed buyback of the government’s 51.8% stake in the former totally government owned enterprise. Similarly, in June 2006, the Foreign Affairs, Defence and Trade Legislation spent half a day questioning Defence officials about the case of a Lieutenant Commander whose claim of sexual discrimination in the force had been in the news. More often Senate hearings follow, rather than generate news. As a general rule, the PBS documents attract more attention than annual reports. This may reflect the fact that historically parliament’s role in holding ministers directly, and public servants indirectly, accountable grew out of the process of approving spending and was C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia 392 Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia December 2009 expanded over time to include other uses of public authority and resources and wider dimensions of performance than financial management. The annual budgetary process remains one of the celebrated rituals of the parliamentary year, even though most informed observers believe that parliamentarians generally have neither the willingness nor the capacity to conduct a systematic in-depth review of spending. Along with tradition, the fact that a set of standing Senate committees has been given the distinctive task of reviewing estimates and a block of time free from distractions of the full house has also led to greater use of the PBS than the ARs. The timing for the release of the ARs, usually on the eve of the start of the October estimates hearings, means that they attract less attention. The formats of the two documents may also account for the difference in the attention they receive. PBS represent ministerial documents. They present information on spending in terms of outputs and outcomes which provide a convenient peg on which to hang specific questions in the news or brought to their attention during the performance of their duties as elected representatives. In contrast the ARs are departmental documents, transmitted to parliament over the signature of the secretary of the department. They are long documents (200– 400 pages) and present the organisational story in a narrative format, supported by charts and graphs. As such, they are seen by many parliamentarians more as PR reports than as objective accountability devices. This is unfortunate, because the ARs often provide the contextual information needed to understand performance, even if there is the risk of positive spin being put on the interpretation of outcomes. In the case of Senate Committee hearings on PBS and ARs the processes element definitely is more important than the product in terms of the reports which committees are required to issue. Hearings serve to sensitise ministers and public servants to issues and concerns, which exist within parliament and beyond. According to a senator interviewed for the study, ministers have been known to ask government members to ask questions in committee in order to raise the matter in a public forum and force depart mental officials to respond (Senator #3). Being called before committees requires ministers and senior public servants to explain and defend before the elected representatives of the public (and potentially the media) what has gone right and wrong with government performance. Committee hearings also represent an opportunity to influence executive thinking and plans before they become set in stone. In these indirect ways, the hearings process can contribute over time to the climate of opinion in terms of ideas and priority concerns swirling around policies, programs and departments. The reports from Senate Committees dealing with the review of estimates and annual reports follow a standardised format and are usually short documents of approximately a dozen pages, most of which is descriptive material on the committee’s members, its terms of reference and the Senate rules for reviewing ARs and reporting back to the full Senate. As mentioned above, the ARs receive far less concentrated attention than the PBS before Senate Committees. As a consequence reports on ARs tend to be rather perfunctory and short. It was even indicated by one Senator that some reports are pre-written before the hearings take place just to ensure that deadlines are met. A typical example of a Senate Committee report on a review of a departmental annual report was filed by the Environment, Communications, Information Technology and the Arts Legislation Committee in September 2006. The committee observed that it had examined all the reports referred to it in terms of their compliance with reporting guidelines and found them all to be ‘apparently satisfactory’, the ambiguous phrase used in Standing Order 25 (21) (a) of the Senate rules which mandates such reviews. Another requirement is for committees to take into account remarks made in the Senate when considering annual reports. Usually this requirement leads to one line indicating that none of the annual reports reviewed had been the subject of discussion in the Senate. Atypical of most Senate reports on ARs was the September 2005 report from the Finance and Public Administration Legislation Committee. Given the mandate of the committee and its focus on central agencies of government it may C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia Thomas 393 not be a surprise to find criticism of the annual report process. The committee criticised delays in the tabling of ARs, unnecessary repetition in annual reports from one year to the next and a lack of comprehensive financial information in the annual reports of a couple of agencies. The short, standardised formats of the reports on ARs means they are prepared by the secretaries to the committees, reviewed by the chair and seldom discussed by the committees themselves. As suggested above, the potential of ARs as parliamentary accountability mechanisms has not been fulfilled. However, their production may be useful to departments and/or agencies in reviewing their own performance, as a means of internal accountability to central agencies and as a mechanism of external accountability to organisations and groups affected by their operations. The requirement that they be placed before parliament adds pressure to tell the department’s story in a credible manner. Senate committee reports on estimates are usually not much more substantive than those on ARs. They are usually somewhat longer than reports on ARs because most committees have adopted the practice of listing the topics covered for each department and/or agency with the pages in their printed proceedings where those discussions are recorded. What this produces is a billboard-type listing of what was on senators’ minds over a couple of days with no elaboration, no analysis and no recommendations arising from the discussion. When a committee has waded into turbulent political waters where there are strong political disagreements, both a main report and a dissenting report may be produced. To put their party’s views on the record, dissenting senators have been known to produce longer reports than the main committee report. One of the senators interviewed for this study was critical of the growing number of minority reports arising from estimates hearings: There is the danger that if we become too political in the issues that we pull out of estimates Committees, there is the risk that the give and take and consensus thinking that our Committees depend upon to work will be lost(Senator #3). The implication of the comment was that the committees would have a greater impact on government thinking and action if there were unanimity in their reports. The factors which might affect the utilisation of reports, are discussed below. However, it must be reiterated that most reports are neither long nor substantive. Governments are required to respond to reports but since most reports simply describe what transpired, the only requirement is to acknowledge the receipt of the report. On reports with analysis and/or containing recommendations, it may be somewhat trickier for ministers and departments to reply, but there is no standard for the fullness and quality of their reply. The timelines of government responses to the small number of substantive reports continues to be a problem since issues move on and off the agenda of parliament quickly. Measuring the influence of the hearings and reports on government performance is impossible, even impressionistically. It is probably exceedingly rare for there to be a direct and immediate impact from a Senate committee hearing and/or report on the operations of a department or a program. Pressures from affected groups or organisations outside parliament, which are reflected and reinforced in the parliamentary process, can cause governments to follow up concerns raised in Senate committees. Some ministers and/or departments may be genuinely looking for advice on how to deal with programs seen to be in trouble. Since reviews of estimates and annual reports focus mainly on the past, ministerial reputations are not as much at risk compared to Senate criticism or rejection of a bills. The quality of a Senate report, including the political, financial and administrative feasibility of any recommendations, could also affect its adoption by ministers and the APS. Of course, quality is partly in the eye of the beholder so there can be disagreements over whether a particular report adds value to the understanding of the challenges and problems facing public sector managers. Given the routine, descriptive nature of most reports, it is clear that they contribute less to public debate about the operations of departments and/or agencies than the hearings, which precede them. C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia 394 Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia December 2009 Conclusions Among cabinet-parliamentary systems based on the Westminster model, the Australian government is seen to be distinctive because of the existence of an elected upper house in which the governing party usually lacks a majority. Even in 2006 when the Coalition government of Prime Minister, John Howard, had a one-seat advantage in the Senate, it would be an exaggeration to say there was an automatic majority for every bill and spending proposal put forward by the government. The government had to ensure that all Coalition senators were on side and it may have wanted for political reasons to attract some cross-party support from other parties and independents. In other words, there was not the almost complete predictability of the passage of government measures, usually unchanged, which existed in the House of Representatives. However, the Howard government did use its recent numerical advantage to block inquiries by Senate committees which could prove politically damaging. The composition of parliament changed after the victory of the Labor Party led by Kevin Rudd on 24 November 2007. While the new Labor government held a majority in the House of Representatives (183 of the 150 seats), it won only 32 of the 76 seats in the Senate. This meant the short period of government control of the upper house has come to an end. As an opposition forum, the Senate has developed an image of itself as a protector of democracy against the potential excesses and abuses arising from the undue concentration of power in the office of the prime minister and to a lesser extent the cabinet. The independence of the Senate from government control and its effectiveness as a house of review for legislation and spending have become entrenched ideas in the culture of the Senate. Parliamentary officials, particularly the long-serving and outspoken Clerk of the Senate, have played a major role in promoting the image of the Senate as the less partisan and more substantive of the two houses of parliament. The fact that the House of Representatives is the confidence chamber, that it offers more opportunities for ministerial careers and that it is basically polarised between the two main parties means that it is allegedly dominated by a partisanship, which its critics see as ritualistic, theatrical and unconstructive. In contrast, the Senate, which can cause political difficulties for a government but not force it from office, offers limited prospects for ministerial postings (which means most senators must resign themselves to parliamentary careers). In addition, the presence of third parties and independents, encourages more consensus approaches, especially in the committees. As suggested throughout the above discussion, the value of partisanship to the effective functioning of parliament is a contentious topic. The traditional view has been that adversarial politics among competing political parties contributes to the emergence of the truth about government performance and provides a strong incentive for ministers and public servants to prevent mistakes and strive for improvement. The fact that the public seems to be turned off by the more theatrical antics of parliamentarians, as well as all the talk about basing accountability on performance, has led some critics to lose sight of the underlying theory of adversarialism which is the foundation for cabinet- parliamentary government. It would be wrong in theory and unrealistic in practice to expect parliament to become a university seminar on performance. It might be possible in the abstract to talk about more constructive partisan approaches, but what qualifies as good versus bad partisanship will always be subjective and controversial. Partisanship is still strong in the Senate. However, it is combined with a collective sense that the upper house must act as a check on executive power and with a slight superiority complex to the House of Representatives, which is seen as too subservient to the government of the day. Even when the Howard government had a numerical majority, the Senate continued to use its committees to probe and to criticise the behavior of ministers and the bureaucracy. As indicated throughout this study, the difficult, often politically unrewarding work of conducting parliamentary scrutiny of the efficiency and effectiveness of ongoing policies and programs has largely been assumed by the Senate C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia Thomas 395 Legislation Committees and the Joint Committee on Public Accounts and Audit. As noted previously, there are multiple purposes, both official and unofficial, behind the efforts of the Senate to conduct scrutiny of performance: to hold ministers accountable; to insure that laws are implemented as intended; to detect waste and mismanagement; to promote economy efficiency, effectiveness and equity in public spending and programs; to hold public managers accountable for their stewardship of public funds and use of public authority; to discover whether laws, policies and programs need to be changed; to promote improvement in programs and services; to enable parliamentarians to represent the needs and concerns of their constituents; and to contribute to the permanent election campaign which is the essence of much (but not all) parliamentary activity. There are multiple parliamentary techniques (Question Time, debates, FOI laws, etc) to support these purposes beyond the conduct of Senate Committee hearings on estimates and annual reports. However, a fundamental limitation on parliament’s capacity for scrutiny is the sheer size of the task. No matter how committed parliamentarians are, irrespective of how many committees are created, no matter how well staffed they are and how much information is placed before them, the Senate can never come anywhere close to providing comprehensive and continuous scrutiny of performance across the vast expanse of departments and agencies. Time and the number of sitting days annually are fundamental constraints. It is often suggested that parliamentarians lack the necessary information to make judgments about the real worth of programs, but this is not entirely accurate. The real issue is that they are faced with voluminous and complicated information, which does not necessarily relate to the issues of public policy and public management that are making headlines at the time. There is, in fact, far more information in circulation within the Australian parliament than Senators and MPs have time to consider. What constitutes quality information for 76 Senators and 150 MPs is not easy to describe because of the diverse and shifting interests of parliamentarians. Officially, parliamen tarians state that they need relevant, timely, valued, objective, reliable, comprehensible, comprehensive and balanced information about the performance of government. Leaving aside the issue of whether these criteria of quality information are consistent (does the requirement for timeliness contradict the requirement for comprehensiveness'); there is the additional complication that parliamentarians do not approach the gathering and use of information in an objective manner. Put simply, parliamentarians are often more interested in vindicators that support their partisan positions than they are in indicators that accurately report on performance. A great deal of staff time and money has been spent on the development and refinement of performance documents like PBS and ARs. There was an acknowledgement from the parliamentarians interviewed for this study that these documents have been improved over time, that they are potentially helpful in supporting the difficult task of conducting scrutiny of performance, but that their potential has not been fully realised for a number of reasons that have more to do with the dynamics of the institution than with the documents themselves. If direct references to the documents in the course of Senate hearings are used as a measure of utilisation, the cost effectiveness of the whole process could be questioned because such references appear to be relatively few in number, but increasing. The word appear has to be used because only a select numbers of committee proceedings were reviewed. Also, outside events like a scandal involving public spending can drive up parliamentary interest temporarily. To make the case that there is a long term trend of increased parliamentary attention to PBS and ARs would require a comprehensive review of committee proceedings over a number of years. The parliamentarians interviewed for this study found it easy to criticise the scrutiny process in parliament. There was far less agreement on how to improve the process. The March 2007 report from the Senate Standing Committee on Finance and Public Administration exhorted the Legislative and General Purpose Committees to examine and report on performance issues more and to make more C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia 396 Parliament Scrutiny of Government Performance in Australia December 2009 effective use of committee staff and the ANAO for this purpose (SSCFPA 2007: Chapter 6). There might be a marginal increase in the quantity and quality of the scrutiny activity of parliament arising from these recommendations, but they do not really address the fundamental challenges. Australian parliamentarians may in fact be too harsh in the evaluation of their own performance. A comparison to other cabinet- parliamentary systems suggests that no country has determined how parliaments can assure themselves, and the public, that past policies and programs are working successfully and achieving results. For example, in comparison to Canada, Australia’s parliament does a much better job than the elected House of Commons and the appointed Senate combined in holding governments and the APS accountable. Estimates receive almost no direct parliamentary attention, performance plans and performance reports from over 90 departments and agencies go unstudied in parliament and there is no system of annual reports which focus so intentionally on outputs and related outcomes as do the Australian documents (see Chenier, Dewing and Stellborn 2005; Thomas 2002). The practice of placing performance reports before legislatures is relatively new. It reflects both dissatisfaction with the traditional mechanisms of parliamentary accountability based upon ministerial responsibility and the development of new approaches to the design and delivery of public policy and programs, which were launched under the label of new public management. The orientation to APS reform taking place within government does not fit well with the traditions and practices of accountability which exist within parliaments. The new performance based approach within the APS emphasises clear goals, planning, risk-taking, monitoring, systematic evaluation and organisational learning. In contrast, the persisting parliamentary culture of accountability emphasises short range problem identification (a bias toward negativity), the prevention of errors by tighter controls, blaming, defensiveness by government officials and an inability to have a constructive dialogue that might lead to longer range learning. Creating such a dialogue will depend more on changes to the separate but intersecting cultures of the parliament and the APS than on institutional reform of the two intuitions. If the goal of achieving a more results-based approach to accountability is to be achieved, parliamentarians will have to take the scrutiny function more seriously, governments will have to encourage their backbenchers to participate more actively in the process of investigating performance, and ministers and public servants will have to take more seriously the content of committee hearings and reports, especially if such processes are to become more meaningful and constructive. Endnotes 1. See L.A. Dexter 1970, Elite and Specialised Interviewing, Evanston, Ill: Northwestern University Press; and the symposium in PS Online, December 2002 at URL:; where the theoretical and practical issues of this interview approach are discussed. 2. For criticism of the Howard government’s use of its majority in the Senate since 1 July 2005 see the following sources: S. Ashe 2007, ‘Undermining Senate Scrutiny' Changes to the Senate Committee System’, Australian Journal of Public Administration 66(3):371–375; C. Evans, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, The Tyranny of the Majority, Speech to the Australian Institute, 10 November 2005; H. Evans, Clerk of the Senate, Democracy: The Wrong Message, Discussion paper, Democratic Audit of Australia, August 2006; Senator A. Murray, Australian Democrats, The Broken Promise: Coalition Misuse of Senate Majority, 18 October 2006. For the government’s response see Senator Hon N. Minchin, Minister of Finance and Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senate Remains Robust Under Government Majority, Media release, 30 June 2006; L. Young, Parliamentary Committees: The Return of the Sausage Machine, Discussion paper, Democratic Audit of Australia, August, 2006; and T. Smith, New Fangs for the Platy- tiger'The Senate and the Rudd Government in C . 2009 The Author Journal compilation C . 2009 National Council of the Institute of Public Administration Australia Thomas 397 2008, Democratic Audit Discussion Paper 7/0, December 2008. 3. On the Australian budget process in general see M. Robinson 2002, ‘Financial Control in Australian Government Budgeting’, Public Budgeting & Finance 22:80–93; J. Wanna, J. Kelly and J. Foster 2000, Managing Public Expenditure in Australia,St. Leonard: Allen & Unwin; and R. Webb 2002, The Commonwealth Budget: Process and Presentation, Canberra: Department of the Parliamentary Library, Research Paper, No 10, March. For procedures in the House of Representatives, see Parliament of Australia, 2005, House of Representatives Practice Fifth edition, Chapter 11, ‘Financial Legislation’, URL: . 4. An excellent source on the evolution of the Senate Committees is the Occasional Papers Series available on line at URL: . 5. Hon. Senator N. Minchin, Minister of Finance and Leader of the Government in the Senate, Senate Remains Robust Under Government Majority, Media release, 30 June 2006. 6. C. Evans, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate, The Tyranny of the Majority, Speech to the Australian Institute, 10 November 2005. 7. See the remarks by M. Keating 1990, Secretary, Department of Finance in Senate Committees and Responsible Government, Proceedings of the Conference to mark the Twentieth Anniversary of Senate Legislative and General Purpose Standing Committees and Senate Estimates Committees, October, 1990. Canberra: Department of the Senate. 8. See the Senate annual reports for 2004-05 and 2003-04, Output Group 4 – Committee Office at URL: Consulted 19 October 2006. 9. Senate Department, Annual Report 2006– 2007. 10. Senate Department, Annual Reports 2004– 2005 and 2006–2007. 11. Clerk’s review in Senate Department, Annual Report 2006–07:4. 12. Evidence to support this conclusion is provided by R. 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