Page 41 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 13 February 1990
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legislature. In that country members of the legislature do not sit on the executive. I think last year when Mr Dick Cheney became the Secretary of Defense in the United States he had to resign as a member of Congress in order to become a member of President Bush's Cabinet. There is a quite distinct separation of powers between executive and legislature. Does that happen in the Westminster tradition? No, it does not.
The fact is that there is a long confusion in the Westminster tradition between the executive and the legislature. In fact, one is drawn exclusively from the other in this country, as in Great Britain. Members of the executive must be members of the legislature; they must be. One is directly and fully answerable to the other. The principle that the executive and the legislature are closely tied in together means it is an apotheosis in the practice of the Parliamentary Labour Party of Great Britain, and it has been further refined by the Australian Labor Party because the practice of the Australian Labor Party has been that the Executive is bound by, and is subject to, decisions of caucus.
Who are the caucus? Who makes up the caucus of the Australian Labor Party? In fact, members of the parliamentary Labor Party sitting in that Parliament. That is the best example I can think of, of a confusion between the legislature and the executive. There is no separation of powers in that model whatsoever.
The fact is that Ms Follett is confused. She ought to acknowledge that fact and she ought to take her facts as she finds them. She has spoken at some length about the inequity of the ACT's new model of government incorporating Executive Deputies. There has been discussion in this chamber already about what the source of that particular model was. I saw that it was attributed to Mr Collaery originally and then Mr Kaine claimed authorship of that concept. But I would say that the authority or the authorship of that principle goes back quite a way further. It is a model very similar to that used in another parliament on this globe. And to find the name of that parliament one has only to look at the motion that Ms Follett herself has moved today. In the second line she refers to the Westminster principle.
Let me tell her about the Westminster tradition. There are three levels of executive government in Great Britain. There are Cabinet ministers, ministers of state and undersecretaries. There is a fourth level below that, consisting of people called parliamentary private secretaries. They have a long tradition in the United Kingdom. Those parliamentary private secretaries are not members of the executive. They act as a liaison between the government parliamentary party and the minister that they work for. All Cabinet ministers have parliamentary private secretaries and some ministers of state have some as well. Their role depends on what their Minister wants
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