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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 05 Hansard (Thursday, 13 May 2004) . . Page.. 1817 ..

want to illustrate the folly of this view it would be hard to go past the example of someone in a position of responsibility who does nothing when a fire breaks out.

Ministerial responsibility is about more than what you personally did; it is about more than what you failed to do; it is about more than what you directly instructed subordinates to do, or what you failed to instruct them to do; it is even about more than what you knew they were doing. In the strict, formal sense—one might say in the Stanhope sense, on the basis of his previous comments in previous no confidence motions, as referred to by my colleague Mr Cornwell—ministerial responsibility means that you are responsible for what happens in your department on your watch, whether you know about it or not.

It was put most succinctly by Harry S Truman when he said, “The buck stops here.” This is the absolute version, as developed in the 19th century along with the Westminster system and as previously espoused by Jon Stanhope before he got into government and decided that misleading was okay so long as you could not prove it was deliberate.

In practice, the view developed in most Westminster jurisdictions in the course of the 20th century that, as departments of state and machinery of government have become larger and more complex, it was not reasonable to hold a minister responsible for everything that happened on his watch. Some decisions were too technical, others too trivial, and others handled at so many administrative layers below the minister that he could not be aware of them all, even if he wanted to. I think most of us—perhaps all of us now—accept that.

But it must be obvious that the decision not to warn the people of Dunlop and Weston Creek in particular that their houses were in dire danger of burning down was neither technical nor trivial. Nor was it far removed from ministerial oversight. The decision had to be taken by the minister or by one of his immediate subordinates. So if he did not know what was happening and he did not ask about the dangers, he should have.

There are two excellent reasons for this. The first is that we want a political culture in which records are kept, notes are taken and held on to, questions are asked and answered and we learn from our mistakes. We do not want a political culture based on plausible deniability. We do not want a political culture where the imperative is to shield the minister from knowledge that may subsequently become embarrassing. We do not want a political culture based on “If at first you don’t succeed, destroy all evidence that you tried”.

We demand the whole truth and we will not settle for anything other than the truth. So we need rules that create an incentive for ministers, and that is why we are here today—to create an incentive for all of us to follow the rules. We need to create the incentive for ministers to ask the hard questions, to require staff to tell them what is going on. When things go wrong we have to ensure that it is in a minister’s interest to find out what the problem is and address it. When a minister says he didn’t ask, the obvious question from us should be, “Why not? Why didn’t he ask? Why was he drinking coffee? Why was he doing all these things and suddenly remembering all these things?”

When a minister says, “They didn’t tell me,” even if we believe him, we have to say, “Then you should appoint people who will tell you and ensure that they do tell you.”

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