Page 3010 - Week 10 - Thursday, 16 August 1990
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MR MOORE: If I did, Mr Speaker, allow me to withdraw any imputation because it certainly was not intended that Mr Duby would spend that himself. Clearly, if we had a couple of extra ministries, the increase in costs would be great.
But there are other problems. What would the new ministries be? One clear one is to split the education and health ministries so that Mr Humphries would have enough time to be able to do the job competently. I think that is one possibility. Having cut that in half, though, we have to determine what the other ministry will be. I suppose the imagination goes quite wild. If Mr Kaine is looking for a very competent Minister - as he has said on many occasions, he would prefer to choose competence over everything else - he might establish a ministry for X-rated movies and bring Mr Stevenson in. That is a possibility.
Of course, there are others. But if he looks across his own backbench he might decide that Mr Jensen would be an appropriate one. If Mr Jensen had a lobotomy first that might improve things, and then he could have a ministry. There is great difficulty for Mr Kaine who has said that, when he has his ministries, he would like to have competent people around him. I can see that this is going to be a great problem.
Another great problem is the one to which Mr Collaery drew attention when he was talking about women and the budget. With a slip of the tongue, he talked about exploiting women in the budget, but I believe he meant preventing the exploitation of women. I recognise that.
The problem is that, if we are to have any sense of fair play and competence, Mr Kaine will have to look to put at least a couple of women into his ministry, and that is going to shift the power play between the two groups - the Liberals with their five and the other five. What is going to happen there, especially when we look at that notion, that somebody mentioned before, of the tail wagging the dog? I pictured a small yappy dog and decided that the tail wagging the dog was about six inches out.
Let me go on to say that this notion of having a couple of extra ministries at this particular time really is very questionable indeed. The people of Canberra are cynical enough already about self-government. The reality is that their cynicism arises particularly from the turnaround antics of many of the people who are now in government. I presume that this will also be seen as part of the same thing. It will, of course, drop the confidence of the people in the Assembly even further, and that in itself is enough reason to leave this sort of discussion, this sort of proposal, until at least the second parliament.
It is also important to note that, if one increased the number of ministries to six, it would be very hard in the next parliament to backtrack to four ministries. It may well be that whichever minority government is in power at
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