Page 965 - Week 04 - Thursday, 3 May 2007
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was not those submissions but the secret functional review that shaped the 2006-07 budget. And how do we know this? We know this because there was widespread criticism of the budget—a sobering lament that the Stanhope Labor government had completely lost touch with the ordinary community. People remember that; people pay for that every day. People pay for that in the increases in their rates and charges and with the dislocation they have suffered as a result of the very illogical school closures undertaken by Mr Barr.
Let me now turn to Mr Stanhope’s code of good government when it comes to the public service. Once again Mr Stanhope made a vast array of sentimental statements with which no-one would, or indeed could, disagree. Words like “impartiality”, “frank and fearless”, “integrity”, “professional”, “responsible”, “dedicated”, “leadership” and “respect” all spring up from the page, and he suggested that all of these qualities needed to be restored to the public service. What did he mean by this? Was he suggesting we had a public service whose qualities were apparently something other than those he listed and therefore needed to be fixed?
That was a vicious attack on our public service, and it goes to the very heart of our public servants. It is a profound insult to the very hardworking people we have in our public service. Only this week the Chief Minister claimed that our questions on expenditure were somehow a slight against the integrity of public servants. Our questions are not an attack on public servants; our questions go to ministerial responsibility—and ministerial responsibility is one of the very foundations of good government and good governance.
This is at the core of the government’s failure to deliver on its own code of good government. Its ministers consistently abrogate their responsibilities. They consistently fob off their responsibilities to public servants. They have no concept at all of ministerial responsibility. The Chief Minister says he had no responsibility to tell the people of Canberra that a bushfire was on their doorstep. He says he had no part to play in the decision to spend $72,000 on a statue. The then minister for emergency services said he had no responsibility to decide if an emergency is an emergency.
Ministerial responsibility also goes to cabinet solidarity, another concept of which the ministers in the Stanhope Labor government seem to have absolutely no understanding. In this very chamber only yesterday we had the Chief Minister pronouncing that we might have a busway in the future, but only a week ago Mr Hargreaves pronounced it dead and buried. Today the Chief Minister has expanded on that; he thinks it is a wonderful idea, something we are definitely going to have, something that has been there on the drawing board for 40 years and, yes, it seems that at some stage he is going to go full steam ahead with that, regardless of the necessity and the cost at the time. Mr Hargreaves, Mr Corbell and Ms Gallagher have all breached cabinet solidarity with monotonous regularity—and what has the Chief Minister done about it? Nothing.
I now turn to the question of the culture of the public service. In his 2001 landmark speech the Chief Minister said:
Labor does not believe a ‘can-do’ culture should be a culture of a responsible and responsive public service.
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