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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 01 Hansard (Tuesday, 10 February 2004) . . Page.. 69 ..

In respect of the matter of public importance proposed by the Leader of the Opposition, issues around ministerial accountability and responsibility in the ACT perhaps are best explained in the context of the position of the Prime Minister. I would have thought that a better example of how we should seek to understand the importance of issues around ministerial responsibility is a Prime Minister who blatantly misleads the nation around the reasons for going to war in Iraq, a Prime Minister who concocts some cock and bull story about weapons of mass destruction as a pretext for invasion which costs the lives of 40,000 or 50,000 people on the basis of so-called intelligence that does not exist in pursuit of weapons of mass destruction that never existed. In those circumstances, the Prime Minister had a real obligation to tell the truth.

Of course, the issues around ministerial responsibility go to those essential issues of honesty and integrity—the need to tell the truth, the need not to mislead and the need as a minister to act always with integrity, with propriety and particularly with honesty. Those are the tenets that underpin the doctrine of ministerial responsibility and the need for full and true accountability in relation to the actions of ministers—not some fanciful, moving notion in Mr Smyth’s second reading speech of whether or not a particular officer has been charged with a statutory responsibility.

This statutory responsibility was explained in detail in the second reading speech made by Mr Smyth. The provision was deliberately inserted into the legislation by the then government to ensure that the chief executive of the department was the person who was to have, in the words of Mr Smyth, “overarching responsibility” and, with it, full accountability to the community and full accountability to the Assembly for the administration of our legislation in relation to child protection, child care, licensing and youth justice under that particular bill.

Mr Smyth in fact says it all. Mr Smyth said to the Assembly, the people of Canberra and those that interpret this particular legislation, “We are introducing this legislation with this particular provision in it to ensure that the interests of children are best represented, and they are best represented through this legislative and administrative structure and arrangements we are putting in place which impose on the chief executive of the department full statutory responsibility and, through that statutory responsibility, full accountability to the Assembly and full accountability to the people of Canberra for the protection of children.” The previous government proposed that that was the best way to ensure that issues in relation to child protection were best managed and best dealt with in this community. This was the legislation that the previous government put in place.

As we know, the then minister who initially administered and implemented that legislation was, of course, Mr Stefaniak. It fell to Mr Stefaniak. The minister charged with responsibility for putting in place the mechanisms to ensure that that legislation was appropriately administered was Mr Stefaniak, and it never happened. We now know that from the day the act came into play, the day the act was implemented—which I think was May 2000, when Mr Stefaniak was minister—these particular systems were not put in place, and that is a pity. At no stage subsequent to that were they put in place. As we know, Mr Stefaniak administered that legislation for the next 18 months or so.

I think every person who has been a member of this place since then needs to accept—it is a matter of enormous regret; something we all regret—that unfortunately none of us

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