Page 4431 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 21 November 1990
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I will be interested to hear whether the Chief Minister is, in fact, now prepared to respond to those remarks - remarks which were essentially made by the Estimates Committee. I, for one, believe that it is essential that he take that responsibility and exercise that level of accountability which he has been called upon to do. I am very sorry that so far he has not addressed himself to either of those areas.
MR KAINE (Chief Minister and Treasurer) (4.16): Mr Speaker, I am quite happy to respond, particularly to the comments by the Leader of the Opposition on travel. Quite clearly, the appropriation for travel for the Executive is part of my portfolio responsibility, and in its totality I accept responsibility for it. It did this year, and it will in future years, have the same scrutiny, in terms of the amount of money allocated to it in the preliminary budgetary discussions, as all other travel votes. In the broad, I will ensure that the total travel vote is not exceeded, and that control is exercised to that extent. But I repeat that Ministers of this Government ought to, properly, make decisions about what travel they undertake on Government business. As I said in the Estimates Committee, they are not office boys. They do not have to run to me every time they want to exercise their right as a Minister and make a decision about what they will do in performing their ministerial role.
So I think that the Leader of the Opposition is somehow expecting a greater degree of control by the program manager - to wit, the Treasurer - in connection with Ministers' travel than she expects other agency managers and other program managers to exercise, because it would be absurd to suggest that the agency head of, for example, health or education would personally authorise every travel warrant and personally keep a detailed account of all of the travel done by the officers in that department. It is an absurdity to suggest it.
But, in the sense of the gross management responsibility and the control over the budget, yes, I accept that responsibility. I think that we are talking about two different things, and I think we were talking about two different things in the Estimates Committee process. What the members of the committee were trying to get me to acknowledge was that I was going to personally tell each Minister when they could travel, how much they could spend on each trip and, indeed, how it would all be acquitted. I hope that clarifies the issue.
In terms of the gratuitous comment from the Leader of the Opposition about the 500 per cent increase in the travel vote for Ministers, a number of statements have been made already which, I think, are self-explanatory, but I think they bear repeating. First of all, she cannot deny that during a good deal of her time as Chief Minister there was an airlines strike, and that even if her Ministers had
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