Photo: VNP / Phil Smith
Parliament's biannual Scrutiny Weeks involve a sudden glut of oversight, substantial enough to sate even the hungriest political appetite.
But despite the sudden feast, these long days of interrogation sample only a soupçon of the underlying information, and the stories that reach the public are but a tincture of that.
That is inevitable. Oversight of government involves a cascade of diminishing attention.
The Scrutiny Week Basics
Scrutiny Week is a bi-annual parliamentary event. It's a recent coalescence of longer periods of scrutiny that ran alongside the normal House sittings. Under the old approach Select Committees tried to manage scrutiny on top of their normal business, often some government ministers managed to limit their appearances or weasel out entirely.
That is harder now. Scrutiny is the only game in town and Ministers and Crown Entity Executives are expected to make themselves available
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