Page 1857 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 15 June 1993
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Mr Connolly: No. There are about 3,000 of them.
MR KAINE: They are senior public servants and Cabinet officers. He has totally ignored the fact that for every person who achieves some notoriety - - -
Mr Connolly: We get only the Cabinet ones reported over here.
MR KAINE: Madam Speaker, may I be protected from the Minister? He has just had his go.
MADAM SPEAKER: Yes, Mr Kaine. Order, please!
MR KAINE: He has totally ignored the fact that, for every potential public official who is put through the griller because of something that might be suspect about their past life or their past performance, there are thousands of public officials appointed in the United States without that sort of process at all. The entire upper echelon of the American administration right across the country is replaced by appointment when the administration changes. Because one or two or three people at the very top level of the administration are subjected to the sort of scrutiny that they are, Mr Connolly says that that is a bad thing. I do not think it is a bad thing at all. But the other point is that that is not what we are talking about here. We have no committee system to put potential public service appointees on the griller.
Mr Connolly: As soon as the first disallowance is moved you will get one.
MR KAINE: Just listen carefully, Mr Connolly. I listened to you. The only experience we have of this kind of thing that Mr De Domenico is proposing is in the Electoral Commission. It worked well there because the Government came out of its cubbyhole, its bunker up on the fifth floor, and for once discussed with other members of the Assembly what it intended to do. It having done that, there was no problem. Those of us who participated in the discussion agreed without reservation with the appointments the Chief Minister wanted to make.
That is the very point. While you hide in your bunker and you make secret appointments that nobody finds out about, even the appointees themselves, until weeks after the appointments are made, you are going to get this kind of problem. But it is you who create it, not us. If you come clean, put your cards on the table and tell us what you want to do, then you will get agreement. If you do not get agreement, Mr Berry, there will be good reason for it, and it will be private disagreement. But if you are going to play this game of hiding in your bunker, making the decisions unilaterally and not telling anybody, when we discover that you have made a bad decision we will tell you about it - and we will tell you about it publicly.
Mr Connolly: That is exactly my point. It will become a partisan political issue.
MR KAINE: Not if you talk to us decently. You have missed my point, Mr Connolly, as you always do. If you would listen you would get the point. Discuss these things with us before you make your decisions, let us into your secrets - they are not deep dark secrets, or they ought not to be - and we will agree with you, just as we did with the appointments to the
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