Page 3059 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 17 November 1992
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The other major area of concern is with communication problems - constituents who have misinterpreted information they have been given or who have misunderstood directives, letters or whatever they have received. Again, they are things that can be solved very simply. Fascinatingly, that information is usually publicly available, but people in the community very rarely know how to use government well, how to use the bureaucracy well. It is our job to show them how to do that - to make phone calls on their behalf, to make representations on their behalf to the people who are actually running the programs with which they have problems.
Ms Follett said that that sort of request, that sort of constituency concern, is something we should be able to satisfy. Unfortunately, that is not what is happening. What we have to do - certainly this is the case in health - is to commit those sorts of requests to writing to the Minister, or alternatively to ring the Minister's office, and then wait and wait for some form of response. Regularly, the sorts of problems I am talking about are things that have very definite timeframes. In health particularly, the complaints are emotional and urgent in nature. They are not things that can wait on the notice paper for three months. They are about nursing home placements for elderly mothers. They are about dementia cases, with people who feel that they will become suicidal if something does not happen. This might seem to Mr Lamont, from the look on his face, terribly emotional; but that is what we are talking about.
Mr Berry: How many of those have you rung us up on?
MRS CARNELL: Quite a number; a number, anyway. What we could achieve if we could get a response quickly - in a few days, or possibly a few hours in many cases - would be dramatic, but we are talking about a few months. In fact, when we write to the Minister's office, often we get back a copy of the letter the Minister has sent to the constituent. The whole reason the constituent wrote to us or got in touch with us is that he or she had not been terribly impressed by a response - a very bureaucratic response - from the Minister. Where does that place people on this side of the house? It places us in a position where we just cannot respond to the very reasonable requirements of the public.
The other thing I find totally remarkable in this situation is that the judgment of senior bureaucrats - people who have been in this system through a number of governments, often through the Commonwealth control of this Territory as well - seems to be questioned by the Health Minister particularly, but by other Ministers as well. Their judgment seems to be questioned on what is a constituency matter, what is sensible policy material, what is information that should be readily available to the public. This creates severe questions about how Ministers view their bureaucrats - and notice that I did not use the words on which you were ruled against, Mr Cornwell. Everybody in this Assembly has friends, colleagues and contacts within the bureaucracy. A number of our staff have actually worked in the bureaucracy. We all know people with whom we are friendly, possibly whom we live next door to. We have a situation at this moment where a number of those people are telling us that they are in fear of losing their jobs if they discuss anything - and I mean anything - with anyone on this side of the house. This is approaching a police state attitude to information. The insecurity and paranoia of this Government, this view that information is the only sort of power that they can possibly rely on, is totally amazing. Open government is about information flow, and this Government have turned it off.
MADAM SPEAKER: The time for discussion of the MPI has expired.
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