Page 1664 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 30 April 1991
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Minister, in short, ought to know what is going on in his department. I challenge other Ministers to get up and say that they think it is okay that their department is running amuck and they do not know anything about it.
Will Mr Collaery get up and defend this Minister on this issue? We know Mr Collaery's previous views on the administration of health in this Territory. We know his heartfelt concerns on television; that he would not want to be in a hospital administered by this Minister. We share his concerns. Will he defend Mr Humphries? Will he say that it is okay for a Minister not to know what is going on in his department? Will he say that a Minister has no responsibility unless the Opposition is aware of the full detail of the administrative minutiae of his department? Of course we cannot expect such nonsense.
Mr Deputy Speaker, ministerial responsibility is clear. I quote the present Chief Justice of Australia. It means the individual responsibility of Ministers to parliament for the administration of their departments. That was stated by Chief Justice Mason in FAI Insurances v. Winneke in 1982. Mr Deputy Speaker, the Minister is responsible for the administration of his department.
It is extraordinary that in the Enfield report, at page 3 of our copy - Mr Humphries seems to have a different numbering system, so I will refer only to our copy - we have a recitation of who is responsible to whom. It states:
The Board of Health is clearly responsible to the Minister for Health, Education and the Arts under the Health Services Act 1990. The Secretary of the Department is also clearly responsible to the Minister. There is a need to clarify their respective responsibilities.
But, Mr Deputy Speaker, where this report is silent - perhaps properly so, as it was not asked to go beyond this - and where this Assembly must speak clearly is to add the next link in that chain of responsibility and that chain of command, and that is, clearly, that, while these officials are responsible to this Minister, this Minister is responsible to this parliament. The failure of an official is a failure of the Minister, and it is the responsibility of this parliament to take the Minister to task for that failure. That, Mr Deputy Speaker, is the elementary principle of ministerial responsibility. For all the ducking and diving and dodging and weaving that we have heard from Mr Humphries, we have not had a simple answer to that solution.
We heard a recitation from the Chief Minister of all the supposedly wonderful things that Mr Humphries has done while he has been Minister. Most of them, like closing Royal Canberra Hospital North and causing havoc in the
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