Speaker: committees must be suspended when MPs lock horns over questions

Committee hearings should be temporarily suspended when MPs butt heads over the eligibility of questions being asked to people answering to a committee. 

The decision was delivered in a Speaker’s ruling on a request by Labour whip MP Glenn Bedingfield, after members of a committee put forward questions he felt were “irrelevant to the report” in question, and at times intimidating for the witnesses. 

The Public Accounts Committee is currently discussing a report by the Auditor-General on the Electrogas contract, which found “significant concerns” over the due diligence carried out in the tender. 

While Bedingfield claimed the questions from the Opposition were “intimidating”, Nationalist MP Karol Aquilina argued that the witness, while under oath, only started to reveal certain details about the issue when pushed on them. 

The Speaker referenced a previous ruling given last year, also about the Public Accounts Committee, over questions brought up in a sitting. 

In that previous ruling, the Speaker confirmed that the committee is free to ask questions within the parameters of the Standing Orders of the House of Representatives. 

The Speaker ruled similarly here. When there is an objection to a question being asked, or in the way it is being asked, it falls within the common sense of the committee chairman to suspend the hearing until members agree on a way forward.