The ABC had an interesting story yesterday on Chief Minister Stanhope’s anger in the face of 2,550 questions on notice lodged by the Greens and Liberals in the course of the estimates hearings.
The Chief Minister says it’s going to cost $1.5 million to answer all the questions.
The examples I’ve heard him use (yet to see a statement on this from his office) in interviews have included questions about the cost of green paint and money spent on temporary footpath repairs.
My question would be what sort of system are they running where these questions are difficult to answer? How on earth can you responsibly decide to undertake these actions without already having numbers on projected cost and performance against budget?
UPDATE: Brendan Smyth is very excited by more cracks appearing in the Labor facade and John Hargreaves thoughts on the quality of questions:
- ‘It’s not so that the questions in fact were trivial, I believe, I think they were quite reasonable questions. (ABC 666 12/6/2009).