Page 3056 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 17 November 1992
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
old textbook which I tracked down in one of the second-hand bookshops. I thought Mr Humphries in particular would be interested in this, given his interest in antiquarian law and the like. It is good old Sir Ivor Jennings's book The Law and the Constitution. I have a 1943 edition. There are earlier ones, but this is a good enough starting point.
Mr Moore: If you cannot read any of it, you can use Dennis's dictionary to interpret it.
MR CONNOLLY: Yes, indeed. He makes the point:
Our language assumes that administrative acts are performed by ministers. But this is almost as much a fiction as the statement that the king governs the Empire. For it is clear that no minister who has to be in his place in Parliament, to make speeches in the constituencies ... can take part in even a substantial fraction of the work of his department.
He goes on:
Each minister is responsible to Parliament for the conduct of his Department. The act of every civil servant is by convention regarded as the act of his minister.
There we have, stated in fine old language, the basic proposition of how a Westminster democracy operates. The people elect a parliament. One party wins and one party loses, or in a three-party system one party is elected to Executive office, with the support of Independents. The self-government Act enshrines that in respect of this Assembly. The Chief Minister appoints Ministers; the Premier appoints Ministers; the Prime Minister appoints Ministers. Those Ministers administer departments and are accountable to opposition members for the actions not only that they themselves take but that every civil servant takes.
Opposition members attack Ministers if they want answers. They get answers. They get access to the bureaucracy through the ministry, not by willy-nilly rampaging through the bureaucracy. That is not how the system works under this administration; it is not how the system has worked under any administration.
Mr Cornwell: So the Chief Minister's guidelines are wrong?
MR CONNOLLY: No, the Chief Minister's guidelines set out the proposition that Ministers are responsible and that oppositions go through Ministers. If you are unhappy with the Minister's answer, that is a political issue and you agitate it politically. In general, you go through Ministers for information, and your ways of doing it are questions on notice or questions in the house.
I have on a number of occasions offered briefings to opposition members, rather than go through a prolific session of questions on notice. But it is within one's rights to keep putting questions on notice, and we will leave that as it is. There is, however, a practice referred to in the Chief Minister's guidelines that on constituency matters there can be some level of access. I must indicate that within probably the largest constituency area, the Housing Trust, there has been
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .