It’s the 40th anniversary of the Senate Committee system this year and I was lucky enough to be caught in a traffic jam (Ipswich Motorway, Friday night) long enough to hear the whole of Peter Mare’s interview with the new Clerk of the Senate (Dr Rosemary Laing) as well as his interview with Senators Troeth, Collins and Siewert about their own work on the different Senate Committees.
On the evening of 11 June l970 the Australian Senate passed an historic resolution to establish two groups of committees - the Legislative and General Purpose Standing Committees and the Estimates Committees. Although parliamentary committees have existed since 1901 the system of Committees established in 1970 brought into being for us the kind of parliamentary oversight enjoyed by the US Committee system.
I learned a number of interesting things from these two interviews not least of which was the role of Senator (as he was then) Lionel Murphy in building the Committee system we have today. Another was of our turning away from Westminster to follow the US style of governance as being deemed more useful to us. Of course our constitution and federal style of government were drawn from the US model to some degree, and lacking a House of Lords (although of course we do have a monarchy) it’s not surprising we would devise the more democratic and less party dominated scrutiny that our Senate committee system provides.
Both of these conversations are available as podcasts –
http://www.abc.net.au/rn/nationalinterest/
Listening to these discussions made me wonder whether we might have a representative from our own fledgling Committee system to talk to us about the work of the Queensland Parliamentary Committees.
There is also a July Conference -
http://www.aph.gov.au/Senate/conferences/ctte-40th-anniversary/conference_flyer.pdf which looks really excellent. Perhaps the great Harry Evans will speak there.
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