Page 30 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 13 February 1990
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joint party room and that the Executive, the four Ministers, will implement the party room decisions. So rather than the Ministers being responsible for executive decision making, as the ACT (Self-Government) Act provides and indeed requires, we see that the accord between the coalition members provides for the real decisions to be made elsewhere and that Ministers are expected to abrogate their legal responsibilities under the Act.
Let us look at the statement that Mr Kaine made in this Assembly on 14 December last year, to see the first signs of the enormous confusion over this role of Executive Deputies. Mr Kaine said:
... Ministers will be entirely responsible for all matters in their portfolio ...
He went on to say:
... the Executive Deputies' role is to provide an additional source of advice and assistance to Ministers.
Mr Speaker, I ask you how this gels with the previous statement in the accord, namely, that all participating members will be involved in executive decision making and that decision making will be vested in the joint party room? In the guidelines that Mr Kaine tabled on that same day he shows that Ministers will not be entirely responsible and in some cases Executive Deputies will, for example, make decisions on anything a Minister can legally delegate, sign correspondence on behalf of Ministers, represent Ministers at ministerial councils and make press comments in their designated functional areas, which has already caused the Government some degree of embarrassment, I would put it to you. But all of this adds up to a clear presumption that Executive Deputies are meant to exercise executive authority, that in some sense they are a kind of Minister and certainly, as Mr Kaine has acknowledged, the media has that impression. They consistently refer to Dr Kinloch as the Minister for education, to Mrs Nolan as the Minister for transport, and so on.
Mr Speaker, there is an old saying - I believe it has been touted recently by a minor Liberal luminary in the Federal sphere - that if something looks like a duck, waddles like a duck, quacks like a duck and hangs around with other ducks it probably is a duck. I put it, too, that Mr Stefaniak definitely seems to think he is a duck, or at least he signs documents like one, as we showed - - -
Mr Wood: No, that document had nothing on it.
MS FOLLETT: It is an insult to ducks. I beg their pardon; I take it all back. But Mr Stefaniak has quite clearly signed a document as a Minister. If Mr Stefaniak does not know what he is doing as an executive deputy and/or a Minister, who does? Who is responsible for him? Who
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