Page 74 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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out of that cabinet room and went on with their daily lives. The opposition choose to believe that two ministers—neither of whom was accorded the luxury of giving their version of events to the coroner—left that room, with dire warnings ringing in their ears, and persisted with prearranged plans to go on holidays. So desperate is he to believe the unbelievable that the opposition leader, who has in fact sat in cabinet rooms and been a party to cabinet meetings, chooses to believe that the dire warnings the coroner says must have been delivered in that room were in fact delivered, even though the official cabinet minutes do not record them and even though not a single minister or agency head can recall them. That truly is desperation on the opposition leader’s part.
There are a number of other serious problems with the comments made by the coroner about the Chief Minister. As we have heard, she evidently misunderstands the administrative arrangements here in the ACT, assuming that we have a system of junior and senior ministers when we clearly do not. One can perhaps imagine how the coroner might labour under such a misapprehension but it is simply impossible that those opposite could share it. They know better and it is disgraceful that they stand here today and make use of the coroner’s misapprehension.
The coroner has also, for unknown reasons, quoted extremely selectively from a radio broadcast from the afternoon of 18 January to back up her assertion that the Chief Minister downplayed the seriousness of the fires, even as they were reaching into the suburbs. We have heard the full transcript; I think in fact the ABC had the courtesy to play it on air.
The frustrating thing is that the Chief Minister was not given the opportunity to answer these assertions from the coroner. If he had been given the chance to answer her suppositions in relation to a number of matters at the time of the inquiry, the weight of the contrary evidence would have been compelling. It would have been so compelling that we perhaps would not be here today engaging in this debate.
This is not the first no-confidence motion in an ACT chief minister, but it is clearly the most unwarranted. The current Leader of the Opposition has sought to call the Labor Party hypocritical for supposedly demanding different standards of ministerial responsibility of former Chief Minister Ms Carnell in relation to the hospital implosion and Mr Stanhope in relation to the firestorm.
In fact, the standard to which Labor holds today is identical to the one it upheld in that earlier debate. It goes to questions of proximity, personal responsibility and knowledge. It goes to the issue of taking expert advice or ignoring expert advice. There were no radio competitions involved in the firestorm. The coroner’s comments about ministerial responsibility appear to stem from a fundamental misreading of political and parliamentary conventions. The question of ministerial responsibility has nothing to do with the issues before the coroner and nothing to do with the Coroners Act.
That said, it is entirely appropriate that the issues of ministerial responsibility are debated—and that place is here. That place is not a courtroom; it is here, where our Westminster traditions have some resonance. We have heard earlier in the debate one formula to describe ministerial responsibility—that put forward by Sir Billy Snedden
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