Brendan Ryan (Labour)

I second the amendment. The difficulty of "cutting and pasting" legislation is illustrated by the subsection Senator Quinn wishes to delete. The Committee of Public Accounts, the committee referred to in the section, is precluded from giving opinions on Government policy. Perhaps that was understandable under an older regime, when the committee's function was to consider only Government Departments and the accounting officer of a Department came to give evidence in relation to a Department's use of the funds allocated to it under the relevant Estimate. Under that regime, the civil servant had no independent existence but was, effectively, an extension of the Minister. In that context, it would be understandable that a civil servant, being, in a sense, the embodiment of the Minister, could not have an opinion which differed from that of the Minister on matters of public policy. That is not how a civil service should operate, though the Department of Finance is capable of making its views clear on many matters despite any supposed constraint. Others in the House may be better informed than I in that regard.