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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 6 Hansard (21 May) . . Page.. 1512 ..

MR WOOD: You have put your foot further in it. The money has been allocated. It has been there. You are trying to tell me that you were not going to start building a high school until March next year. We know the time you need before you can start a high school to make sure that it is going to be completed on time. You are flat out doing it in that time.

There is nothing new about this. There is no new money to be spent. Indeed, the public works program is going to have less money as a result of this. The Chief Minister says, "It has not been cancelled; it is just not going to be spent". Somehow or other we might work out the logic of that. I am particularly annoyed with the Deputy Chief Minister for creating a fraud on the people of Canberra, on a thousand people at a dinner the other night, by claiming to bring something forward when there is no change. It has been on the program, it has been planned for 18 months ahead of this time, and it is now proceeding in the normal routine way.

MR SPEAKER: I would like to welcome representatives from Kaleen High School, who are attending a local government course. We welcome you to your Assembly.

MS McRAE (11.37): I want to focus my remarks on a statement that was made in the Government's response and that my colleagues have touched on but have not necessarily gone into detail about; and that is the sheer hypocrisy of the statement in regard to the primacy of this Assembly, which I find absolutely breathtaking. What we are seeing here is a pattern from this Government - that whenever there is a problem you suddenly shift the blame to somebody else. This Government has put all senior bureaucrats on contracts and we have heard time and time again that, if they do not deliver, out they go.

What is forgotten in all of that is a primacy in the Westminster system, and that is ministerial responsibility. We have a Chief Minister. The Chief Minister forms her Executive and those people have the primary responsibility for managing the ACT on our behalf. They have a budget to manage, they have portfolios to manage, and they have policies to implement, more or less on behalf of us and, through us, the people of Canberra. That is their contract with the people of Canberra. Now, what have we heard from this Government about, "If you do not deliver, out you go."? Nothing at all. In any other parliament if a Minister does not deliver on their budget, if a Minister does not deliver on their contract to the Assembly, to the parliament, to the people, that Minister is responsible for their mistakes, and either they resign or their Chief Minister pulls them into line.

This is where the sheer hypocrisy of this nonsense of the primacy of the Assembly has to be tackled head-on. It is not for Assembly members to manage the Health Department. We are not privy to the information that the Minister has. We are not privy to the day-to-day decisions. We are not given the sort of information that not only must a Minister have but a Minister must demand as part of their responsibility. There is no escaping this responsibility; but there is a pattern that we see time and again from this Government, as I have said before, and that is, "When we find a problem, put it on to somebody else to solve it".

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