Mr. Tom Considine:

Well, first of all, what did I do: we modernised the legislation for recruiting public servants - that's one thing that we did - and I used that legislation to recruit eight administrative officers, you know, graduates, in the first quarter of 2006. Three of those had master's degrees in economics and the rest of them had various kind of qualifications that we had specified. And, in March 2006, the management advisory committee agreed to recruit another ten. I assume ... I don't know what happened to that, but that's what the decision was anyway when ... you know, in March 2006. In addition to that, we felt that there was a need to strengthen analysis, not just in the Department but throughout the public service, and we launched a programme allowing suitably qualified assistant principal officers to do a two-years master's in policy analysis and generally we stepped up our support for policy analysis all over the place; you know, five-day programmes, diplomas, that kind of thing. And I-----