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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1999 Week 12 Hansard (24 November) . . Page.. 3601 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

that it is part of a long-term personalised campaign against the Chief Minister, Kate Carnell.

Mr Stanhope started by saying that he accepted that there was no personal involvement by the Chief Minister in causing the death of Katie Bender. I am not sure that everything else he has said or that his colleagues have said has supported that view, but that is what he said at the very outset of his remarks today. What we then come back to is a sense of how the doctrine of ministerial responsibility cuts in to apportion blame to the Chief Minister in a way which the coronial inquest findings do not do directly.

We have two tests to apply. The first is: Does the report itself attach blame to the Chief Minister sufficient to warrant her removal from office? Let me say, Mr Speaker, as the Attorney-General and the deputy to Mrs Carnell, that I would have had no hesitation in turning to Mrs Carnell in the event of a finding that there had been direct or personal responsibility for Katie Bender's death and saying, "Kate, I think that you have to go", but the report did not find that. It most expressly found the reverse to be the case - that there was no direct or personal responsibility.

In those circumstances the only way that the Opposition can get up a motion of no confidence is to rely on the doctrine of ministerial responsibility. Now, that is fair enough, except that what the Opposition have done here today in bringing forward this concept of ministerial responsibility is to manufacture a standard of ministerial responsibility which is completely unsupported by any evidence that would sustain it as a basis on which this place can operate. It is completely unsubstantiated. The standard which they have articulated, ill - defined though it might be, is unprecedented anywhere else in Australia.

One precedent we heard from Mr Quinlan was the resignation of John Hart, the manager of the New Zealand rugby union team. That was the only precedent he could cite. So it is unprecedented. It is not supported by any academic writings on the subject which have been brought forward in today's debate at least, and it is also, moreover, unsustainable as a formula for government to operate on.

If you adopt the standard which they are arguing for today, Ministers will be dropping like flies, every bloody week that the Assembly sits. Excuse the French. Mr Speaker, they would be dropping like flies. There would be no basis for Ministers to avoid the actions that take place in their names within the public services of this country.

I want to quote a very good articulation of the present state of the doctrine of ministerial responsibility from a paper that was delivered in 1996 by the now editor of the Canberra Times, Jack Waterford, in which he addressed this popular notion that the doctrine of ministerial responsibility means basically that if you are the Minister in charge of a department and something goes wrong in the department you wear the blame for it and you have to resign. He said this:

In a golden age, some think, a minister of the Crown took absolute responsibility for everything which occurred under his administration and, if some mistake or malfeasance occurred, then the minister

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