If ASIC’s Shipton drops out, how will Parliament ever log in?
For the record, Outsider is amongst those who believe that Parliament should be sitting in Canberra whether in the Parliamentary chambers of both houses or via digital/video means such as the ubiquitous Zoom or Skype.
However, he is prepared to concede that on the evidence available from a recent hearing of the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Economics that the technology crew at Parliament House has some serious mountains to climb to achieve a seamless Zoom rendering of Parliament.
If any proof was needed of this, it was the fact that in the middle of explaining some of the regulator’s less glorious achievements over recent months, the chair of the Australian Securities and Investments Commission, James Shipton, simply disappeared from the system.
Luckily for him, some of his commissioners were on hand to answer the relevant questions, but it was then later discovered that the chair of the actual Parliamentary Committee itself, Tim Wilson, had also dropped out for a period, albeit that his absence was decidedly less noticeable.
So, while Outsider thinks that our Federal Parliamentarians should be doing the representative work they were elected to do, he acknowledges that perhaps it is a technological bridge too far and that points of order and questions without notice might lose something if those making them are sporadically and randomly lost in the digital ether.
Then, too, he is pretty sure that interjections will lose something if Parliamentarians forget to switch off the mute button.
AUTHOR
The Outsider
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