Page 21 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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When responsibility for a serious matter can be clearly attached to a particular Minister personally, it is of fundamental importance to the effective operation of responsible government that he or she adhere to the convention of individual responsibility.
Mr Stanhope set out his interpretation of ministerial responsibility during the debate on 24 November 1999. His own code of ministerial responsibility at that time required individual ministers to be responsible to the Assembly for the administration of their departments and agencies and that, where there was a systemic failing of government administration, the minister must be held responsible even if the minister had no direct or personal responsibility for the failing that, in the case of the implosion he was talking about, led to Katie Bender’s death.
Mr Stanhope went on to state that his test of the standard of ministerial responsibility is proximity. Where something goes wrong and the ministers involved were well removed from the incidents and the public servants involved were well down the chain, the minister is not responsible. That is probably something we all accept. He stated, however, that in the case of Kate Carnell in relation to that implosion:
… the proximity is stark. We are talking about the head of the Chief Minister’s Department. We are talking about senior executives in her department, with direct access to the Chief Minister. We are talking about the Chief Minister’s media adviser; her personal staff; the staff in her office.
Kate Carnell defined ministerial responsibility in the hospital implosion no-confidence motion as:
If a Minister ignores advice—if I had ignored advice that there may be a problem with the. implosion—the Minister should be out.
She said further in relation to that matter:
Remember, the coroner has made it clear that there was no information that came to me to alert me to any problems.
She added some prophetic words which are so relevant to the debate today, saying:
Did the government know that anything was wrong?
She went on to say:
If we had known that there was any danger at all, obviously we would have done something about it. If we had known something was wrong and we had done nothing about it, I have to say that there would be no need for this no-confidence motion today because, as Mr Humphries said, I would not be here right now.
The hospital implosion coronial inquiry did not blame Kate Carnell in terms of having that required degree of proximity. She did not know anything was wrong and she blithely, along with half of Canberra, went along to see an event that went tragically wrong.
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