Page 556 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 April 1994
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Madam Speaker, I think that the current state of the law and the practice, as it were, in Australia is best stated by the Coombs Royal Commission into Australian Government Administration in 1976. I want to quote one paragraph from the report of that royal commission. It states:
There is little evidence that a minister's responsibility is now seen as requiring him to bear the blame for all the faults and shortcomings of his public service subordinates, regardless of his own involvement, or to tender his resignation in every case where fault is found. The evidence tends to suggest rather that ... ministers ... themselves are not held culpable - and in consequence bound to resign or suffer dismissal - unless the action which stands condemned was theirs, or taken on their direction, or was action with which they ought obviously to have been concerned.
The most recent exploration of the concept of ministerial responsibility, aside from the sports rorts affair, was the pay TV affair last year in the Federal Parliament which centred on the then Federal Minister for Transport and Communications, Senator Bob Collins. I think Ms Follett has referred to this inquiry. The Senate conducted an inquiry in addition to that conducted by Professor Dennis Pearce, the same gentleman conducting the inquiry that we have referred to today. There were two reports of that select committee of the Senate. The second report, and, indeed, the first report, contained valuable summaries of the present state of practice on ministerial responsibility. The committee summarised four categories of action where resignation or dismissal of a Minister "invariably" - that is their word - results. I will not go into most of them, but the first of those four categories was "personal behaviour or conduct which is unacceptable to community standards". They further amplified that particular category by describing it as follows:
Unacceptable personal behaviour may range from deliberately misleading or lying to parliament to being convicted of a criminal offence.
Madam Speaker, unacceptable personal behaviour may range from "deliberately misleading or lying to parliament".
I want, finally, to quote a further paragraph from that select committee report. It says this in the first volume:
Serious lapses in personal behaviour and conduct, and in particular deliberately or recklessly misleading parliament, usually result in resignation. Even with misleading parliament there are variations in outcome. If a minister unintentionally supplies incorrect information to parliament and takes the earliest opportunity to correct the record, it would be unusual for the incident to be taken as an offence worthy of resignation.
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