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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 7 Hansard (30 June) . . Page.. 1859 ..
MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):
anywhere in the world has seen before today, which is a new invention which does not deserve to be given ventilation in this place because it is a silly, ridiculous standard to have to expect any government to live by?
Those opposite say that this is the standard which governments should live by. If governments find that they have people breaking the law underneath them, the Ministers concerned should accept, under the Westminster tradition of ministerial responsibility, their part in that exercise and they should resign. That is what they say opposite. Presumably if this is an ancient and much valued element of the democratic process, there will be some academic exposition of this principle. There will be some place we can go to open a book and read where this principle is outlined. Is it not strange that after five speeches in favour of this motion nobody has yet cited an example from a textbook, from House of Representatives Practice, from anywhere, in support of this proposition?
In fact, Mr Speaker, when I go to House of Representatives Practice, which is pretty much the bible for this particular chamber when in comes to matters of this kind, I find a very clear exposition of ministerial responsibility made out at some length in that document. I am amazed that it has not been quoted by the people who supported this motion. Let me fill in where the Opposition has failed to do so. I will read from House of Representatives Practice under the heading "Individual ministerial responsibility" from page 87 onwards. It quotes the 1976 report of the Royal Commission on Australia Government Administration, the Coombs report, and it says:
... 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 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.
Further, the Coombs royal commission said:
I continue to believe that in the matter of ministerial responsibility, in the strict sense of actions done in his name for him or on his behalf in his role as a minister -
they were still sexist in those days, obviously -
his responsibility is to answer and explain to parliament for errors or misdeeds but there is no convention which would make him absolutely responsible so that he must answer for, that is, to be liable to censure for all actions done under his administration.
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