Mr. Paul Savage:

Yes, we would be keen to do that. We can follow up, perhaps with the clerk, on the timing of that so that, as the Senator said, the committee can get in early. Normally, we would inform the committee through the COMs that we send on concerning proposals that are coming down the tracks for us. For instance, the pesticides regulation, which we are talking about now, is at a very early stage of the process. We can certainly take the committee's views on that proposal and feed them into the discussions that will get under way in earnest early next year. We are happy to come back and discuss that with the committee further. As a broad principle, we will be happy to engage with the committee as early as members wish on any of the other COMs or new proposals that are coming through. We can certainly follow up with the clerk to the committee in terms of how we might more effectively do that.

The way this works now is that we inform the committee of all proposals. We do that within, I think, 28 or 30 days of the proposal being published. If the committee needs to have a discussion with us at that point to see whether there are particular proposals that are of special interest to it and in which it wants to have input, we could certainly add that layer to the discussion. At the moment, we wait for the committee's feedback and allow it to identify the proposals that members want to discuss with us. It might be difficult to do this across all of the proposals and COMs that are coming in.