The daily quiz: Question Time explained

When MPs get together in the debating chamber each sitting day, the first big thing they do is a quiz. An hour-long, high-stakes quiz.

From the outside Questions Time can look like a lot of posturing, accusations and counter-attacks; but there are actually many rules, tactics and purposes behind the fireworks.

The purposes of Parliament

For context… Parliament has three main jobs:

• It provides a government (from amongst its own members); 
• It considers and approves legislation; 
• It oversees government’s actions and approves its spending. 

Basically, Parliament is the real boss and after offering up a government it then watches that government suspiciously and approves or rejects its plans. 

Part of that oversight involves an endless investigation. The MPs have the right to ask Ministers (who are the government) anything about their jobs and get a speedy and accurate answer. 

MPs asked the Government more than 44,000 questions just last year! 

Mostly you don’t hear about them because about 40,000 of those were in writing (and so were the answers). You can read all the written ones on the Parliament website. The others were asked in the House, live on TV.

Questions in the House

Question Time is constructed of twelve pre-published primary questions to Ministers, each followed up by numerous supplementary questions (which aren’t known in advance). 

The primary questions are pre-published to allow ministers to come prepared to answer in detail. And they are expected to do so if the primary question is specific enough to allow that. 

The format 

• Questions are divvied up according to how many MPs each party has in Parliament that aren’t ministers (opposition MPs get way more questions than government back-benchers).
• The twelve primary questions tend to come from different MPs (except the Leader of the Opposition often asks two).
• Each primary can have multiple follow-up questions (supplementary) until a party runs out of their total allocation. 
• Supplementaries are at the discretion of the speaker who can give extras or take some away.
• The primary questioner gets to ask the first follow-up question, but after that it’s open for any MP to join in.
• Each supplementary must relate back to the primary question.

Purposes of opposition questions

• Discover information,
• Highlight information (already discovered via written questions),
• Make a minister look incompetent, stupid, mean or dodgy,
• Make the questioner look concerned, competent, etc,
• Criticise an action or policy,
• Portray a policy or action in a particular way,
• Trap a minister into saying something untrue or unwise,
• Set up for a more meaningful follow-up question,

Purposes of governing party questions

• Provide an opportunity for a minister to highlight good news,
• Provide an opportunity for a minister to look busy or proactive,
• Provide an opportunity to provide publicly useful information,
• Allow the minister to point out recent praise,
• Provide an angle for a counter-attack on opposition questions,
• Provide an opportunity to give context to an issue, 
• Crack a joke at the opposition’s expense,
• Make opposition questions look facile, self-serving or inept,
• Help dig a minister out of hole dug by a previous answer. 

And that’s just the obvious purposes. It’s a tangled web they all weave. 

General vs specific questions

• General primary questions (e.g. ‘does the minister stand by all her statements?’), leave the minister guessing at the line of attack, and less able to come prepared.
• General primary questions enable wide ranging supplementaries, but shallow answers  
• Specific primary questions narrow the range of questioning and give the minister warning of the line of attack; but ministers are expected to come able to answer in detail. 
• Here’s an article with more discussion of the tactics of general questions.

The basic rules

Questions must:

• Be concise and without superfluous extras.  
• Only contain necessary and verifiable facts.
• Not include arguments, epithets, irony, or opinion.
• Relate to a minister’s responsibilities as a minister (not an MP). Here’s more detail on that.

Ministers:

• Must answer unless they think it is not in the public interest to do so.
• Must “address” the question, which doesn’t necessarily mean answer it.
• Cannot lie or guess answers (“misleading the House” is a no-no). 

And:

• Sarcasm isn’t allowed (which doesn’t necessarily prevent it).

Be the Minister

Questions are directed to a role, not a person. Answers are given as the role, not the person. So if a minister answers on another minister’s behalf they are asked and answer as if they were them (including their gender). This means that Winston Peters is frequently asked “does she think…?”  Audio examples here.

Questions must only relate to one ministerial responsibility at a time. So you can’t get one person to answer as three roles. But you can ask a minister in one role about the same minister in another role. You can find an audio example and discussion of that here.

One step removed

All questions and answers are given in the third person. This is because they are all actually being asked through the intermediary of the Speaker (through whom all statements made in the House are directed).

And also

Very occasionally extra questions get directed to non-ministers about their responsibility over a member’s bill or a select committee or something else to do with ‘the business of the House’. 

Multi-pronged questions only need to be answered in part, which leaves a minister able to decide which part  to answer and which to ignore.

Ministers are not responsible for previous governments (which restricts what they can say about them), but they can refer to previous governments’ actions if current actions are affected by them (which they usually are).

Listen to Chris Hipkins and Annette King discuss Question Time tactics with The House.