Page 32 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 13 February 1990
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doing what the Executive wants. Now the Executive decides that five of its members, the deputies, will not be accountable through question time for their actions. They are not accountable, even though they clearly think they have policy responsibility and even though they can exercise delegated decision-making power, as Mr Kaine has said. Now the Executive has half of its members asking the other half questions - by their own admission, dorothy dixers - when they were all collectively responsible for making the decisions in the party room.
Mr Humphries: You were, too, when you were in opposition. Bill Wood asked you questions.
MS FOLLETT: He was not an Executive Deputy. Now that each of the Assembly committees has a majority of members from the Executive those committees are hardly likely to play an independent role or to scrutinise the Government, but that is their job. Now the Standing Committee on Administration and Procedures, which was set up as a committee of private members to run the affairs of the Assembly, is dominated by members of the Executive Government. Now it will be the Government which decides in that committee the priority of private members' business. This is the kind of contempt for the Assembly and for principles of representative government which allows Mr Kaine to censor private members' Bills, to say that he will decide what private members are allowed to introduce into the Assembly.
Mr Speaker, I will run through again what are the implications for the Canberra community of these Executive Deputies. There is certainly a greater expense to the public purse. There is absolute confusion about who is responsible, who is the Government. Mr Speaker, your article in the Chronicle admits as much. You refer to the confusion in the electorate about the role of the Executive Deputies. I think the electorate is not the only one that is confused; the Government is as well.
Members of the electorate, of course, have the suspicion that when they speak to an Executive Deputy they will not be getting a real decision from a legally responsible person. They feel that they are getting second best, because they have the monkey and not the organ grinder. At one meeting, at which I was present, there was also a Minister and an Executive Deputy present, and the minutes subsequently recorded the Executive Deputy as a bureaucrat.
There is also a complete lack of knowledge about who really rules the Government. Is it the Chief Minister or is it Mr Collaery's deputies peering over his shoulder? Is it the four Ministers or is it the entire 10 member Executive? Who knows? I do not think the Government does.
What can the community think about the stifling of debate in this Assembly and the fact that private members' business will now be controlled by the Government? Finally, Mr Speaker, in all the confusion, what sort of
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