Page 1665 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 30 April 1991
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
education system, are hardly achievements that we would boast of. We would suggest that it would have been better if the Minister had left the education system alone and had left Royal Canberra Hospital North alone, and had looked after the actual financial details of his department.
Instead, he seems to have been diverted by this great crusade to rip the guts out of Canberra to the point that he just simply was not on top of the detail. He did not know what was going on. He has allowed chaos to develop in the financial administration of his department. He has allowed massive budget overruns, and his defence is, "Well, you cannot blame me because the Opposition did not know about it".
Mr Deputy Speaker, the principles are clear. I will go again to a very old, very well established authority. Sir Ivor Jennings, professor of political science for a long time at the University of Cambridge, in his classic textbook The British Constitution, set out in the chapter headed "Cabinet Government", in a fairly definitive way, and in a way that is accepted by most other writers, the principles of ministerial responsibility under the Westminster system. He says:
The responsibility of ministers to the House of Commons -
and we go from this system -
is no fiction ... If the minister chooses, as in the large Departments inevitably he must, to leave decisions to civil servants -
and that is what obviously has happened here -
then he must take the political consequences of any defect of administration... He cannot defend himself by blaming the civil servant. If the civil servant could be criticised, he would require the means for defending himself.
I apologise for the use of sexist language, but this book was written originally in 1951, and it seems to make the assumption that senior civil servants will all be male. He continues:
If the minister could blame the civil servant, then the civil servant would require the power to blame the minister. In other words, the civil servant would become a politician.
The fundamental principle of our administration is, however, that the civil service should be impartial and, as far as may be possible, anonymous.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .