Page 69 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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The answer is that she has done nothing. That failure to act is central to the motion that we are debating today. The Chief Minister says that she accepts responsibility, but she has done nothing. In contemporary political life, arrogance and politicians are often linked. But the Chief Minister, in her failure to discharge the responsibility that she says she bears, has displayed an arrogance that almost defies description.
Of course, those familiar words were uttered in this place on 24 November 1999 by the current Chief Minister. That was a set of ground rules that he was happy to apply to Ms Carnell when she was Chief Minister, but of course he is not willing to stand by those today—different rules apply when you are sitting in the job. On that day, Mr Stanhope, then Leader of the Opposition, was lecturing the government of the day on the importance of ministerial responsibility—something we have also heard diluted today through ingenious descriptions of what really amounts to, if you accept the government’s perspective, all care and no responsibility. That was a lecture that he seems to have forgotten.
Indeed, given today’s debate, in addition to being able to draw the Chief Minister’s own conclusion of arrogance, a charge of hypocrisy has to be levelled. When in opposition, Mr Stanhope believed strongly that “at the end of the day the minister is responsible”. He is a great advocate of Harry S Truman’s “the buck stops here” when it suits him, when it suits the spin for television; but when the accountability is really back on his table, suddenly it is everybody else’s fault.
Was the Chief Minister responsible, and how did he fulfil his responsibility? It would appear that the Chief Minister is now saying that he, the minister in charge on 18 January, was not in fact responsible for the failure to warn the people of Canberra of an impending disaster. This morning the Chief Minister has claimed that he was not really the minister in charge for the whole period stated in the coronial report. But, by his own admission, he was in charge by close of business on the 17th. Whichever version of facts is accepted, he did hold responsibility. Of course he quietly glosses over the fact that, at the end of the day, he is head of the government. And one not unreasonably assumes that as Chief Minister he is not just one of the troops, as he would almost have us believe.
He relied this morning on a sort of technical defence and dwelled on technical issues about some error about junior and senior ministers. He was very anxious to pick a time to say, “Well, I was not the minister then; it is not my problem. I think it was probably our guest here today or somebody else that should be responsible. I am simply saying I took over at this time, and I wash my hands of earlier periods.”
In terms of the announcements to the media that he has again attempted to defend, he said, “I just used the words ‘administrative matter’ but that didn’t downplay it.” But what does it mean when you hear a Chief Minister say, “This is an administrative matter.” Of course the people of Canberra are going to say, “Well, that is some procedural formality,” instead of it being very clear that a drama was about to descend on a large number of our community.
We are told that there was nothing in the briefing that gave him cause for concern, but
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