Page 607 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 12 April 1994
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tends to suggest that while ministers continue to be held accountable to Parliament in the sense of being obliged to answer to it when Parliament so demands, and to indicate corrective action if that is called for, they 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.
So there are fairly serious issues for all of the members of this chamber to consider, particularly as we deal today with this most important matter.
Further on the issue of individual ministerial responsibility, House of Representatives Practice states:
When responsibility for a serious matter can be clearly attached to a particular Minister personally, it is of fundamental importance to the effective operation of responsible government that he or she adhere to the convention of individual responsibility.
I think there is little doubt that in this chamber today the Minister has accepted responsibility for the ACTTAB-VITAB contract. To conclude with a further quotation from House of Representatives Practice, in relation to Ministers in particular, it states on page 346:
... if a motion of want of confidence in, or censure of, a Minister were successful and its grounds were directly related to government policy, the question of the Minister or the Government continuing to hold office would be one for the Prime Minister to decide.
Obviously, we are looking at a Federal situation here. It continues:
If the grounds related to the Minister's administration of his department or his fitness otherwise to hold ministerial office, the Government would not necessarily accept full responsibility for the matter, leaving the question of resignation to the particular Minister or to the Prime Minister to appease the House and satisfy its sense of justice.
That in a sense is what we are doing today. We are assessing whether this motion of no confidence in the Minister for Sport can be substantiated at this point. As well as my consideration of House of Representatives Practice, which I think is the best guide to informing ourselves as to the likely steps we can take as an Assembly, I have also been back very thoroughly over the relevant uncorrected proof transcript of the Estimates Committee hearings of last year, in which both the Minister and Mr Neck, the chief executive officer of ACTTAB, talked quite extensively about the importance of ACTTAB being linked to the Victorian TAB superpool. It was the impression of members who attended that committee hearing that that link was of considerable importance to the ACT and certainly that the ACT stood to gain a significant standing in terms of the return the ACT could secure in the future by being linked to the Victorian superpool.
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