Page 2347 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 June 1994
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
include means that an autonomous instrumentality would not be constituted as an administrative unit. Administrative units are the very basis of this Bill. Including autonomous instrumentalities within this Bill has been voted on many times in this Assembly. It is clearly the majority will that they be included within the Bill.
Mrs Carnell's proposed amendment would restrict an important right of the head of the Executive, and that is to determine the machinery of government. The amendment would be quite unprecedented, in my view, in terms of its implications for any head of government. As I say, it has been put forward, I can only conclude, by a person who does not ever expect to be a head of government. From that point of view, I regard the amendment as bordering on the irresponsible. The intention of it is to restrict the Government's ability to deal with these areas which are within its control. The Government would not, for instance, be able to abolish or to change an instrumentality even where that body was clearly acting against the public interest, or was clearly operating fraudulently or corruptly. Mrs Carnell would still not want the Government to be able to change that. I think it is a silly amendment, and I urge all members to oppose it.
MR KAINE (3.10): The more the Chief Minister speaks on matters of public administration, the more she demonstrates how little she knows about the machinery of government. What she is saying is that there is no room for any agency of government to be outside the steel fist of the Chief Minister. That runs contrary to the way public administration is running everywhere in the world except in the ACT. Even within Australia, amongst the States the tendency is to set agencies of government outside the iron grip of the Minister, particularly when they are commercially oriented, so that they can get on with the job without being interfered with.
If the Chief Minister bothered to do what some of us did recently and go to New Zealand to see what they have done there she would be staggered. She could not possibly conceive that any government - and that was a Labour government - could do the things that have been done with the administration over there. She is completely out of step with what is happening elsewhere, and I mean everywhere. She says that this would destroy the structure. My biggest criticism of this Bill right from the beginning has been that it does not provide for any structure whatsoever.
The Chief Minister has not even defined what functions she wants this organisation to perform, let alone define a structure within which they would be performed. She is totally inconsistent, totally illogical, and she does not have any grasp of what is happening in public administration across Australia. Let us ignore the rest of the world for the moment. For her to argue that, because an agency of government is not an administrative unit, by definition it cannot be under the control of the government is a nonsense. There have been things called statutory authorities for decades. We have a number of them right here, and they are all subject to ministerial direction by the very statutes that set them up.
How can the Chief Minister argue that she can be a Minister who is capable of issuing a directive to a statutory authority on the one hand and then say that she cannot do that simply because it is not defined as an administrative unit under this Bill? It is a nonsense. Mr Connolly was talking earlier about stuff and nonsense. I would go further. What the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .