Do you throw all your resources into your first attack? Do you give more weapons to your stars? Do you expend more effort on attacking your strongest or weakest opponents?
Question time is a battle, thick with strategy and skill. The allocation of questions is the least of it, but it's important all the same.
Each government and opposition spends efforts on trying to discover their best use of questions. Questions are a finite resource so where do you aim them?
The kick-off to Oral Questions is often a stoush between the leaders. Photo: VNP / Daniela Maoate-Cox
There are only 12 Primary Questions to Ministers each day. And 60 follow-up (supplementary) questions that flow on from them. The 60 supplementary questions are at the discretion of the Speaker - which is why the current Speaker uses their availability as a carrot-and-stick to encourage good behaviour.
All the questions are divvied up according to relative party size. But parties can allocate their supplementary where they may. They can choose to focus their resources at particular questions or targets.
When present, the first question is typically from the Leader of the Opposition to the Prime Minister. On Wednesday the Leader of the Opposition asked 13 follow-ups to the Prime Minister in a new front-loading approach.
Those were followed by two further supplementaries from ACT, that party's entire allocation for the week.
The primary they all stemmed from was as broad as a question can be - which allowed follow-ups on an variety of policy areas. But there's a downside to that approach. If you ask a broad primary question (which is pre-published) you can't expect any specific details in all the answers that follow; because you haven't given the Minister a chance to get a specific briefing and come prepared.
We promised a link to our earlier article and radio-show on Unparliamentary Language. There you have it - a discussion of the disallowed from "a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent,” to "cat-weasel".
