Page 35 - Week 01 - Tuesday, 25 February 2014
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The Youth Advisory Council last year shared on its Facebook page a post directly from the ALP site. This was not a government message but instead a political message. It consisted of both members of this Assembly as well as federal Labor members in a photo waving banners promoting the Labor Party. While this post was made by the Youth Advisory Council in October—a council that is funded by ACT taxpayers to represent a broad range of views held by youth in the ACT—the inaction by this minister or the directorate to ensure that proper procedures are followed when using social media resulted in one member of the advisory council having to resign as she no longer believed that her views were welcomed on a council that has a clear partisan bias.
This minister has to go. She has a long demonstrated history of incompetence. She has lost the confidence of many in the community. She has lost the confidence of staff within her directorates and she has now lost the confidence of many within the Assembly.
MR COE (Ginninderra) (11.39): Madam Speaker, I intend to speak on the theme which each of my colleagues has touched on. It was drawn out very well by Mr Wall. This is really about judgement. Judgement in politics perhaps could be described in this way: what is the minister’s view before she has had advice, before she has had advisers in her ear, before she has been given the dot points, before she has been given the cheat sheet, before she has been given all the information which her department and her staff provide her?
To be honest, I think it would be a worry. I really would wonder about what advice or what decisions she would make had it not been for departments constantly putting information before her. It goes to the point: what is the point of having this minister if simply the department’s or the staff’s views are always going to get up? You may as well give that same advice to another minister.
I would bet that when Minister Burch has a submission she wants to take to cabinet, everybody else there just follows down the dot points on the sheet of paper which the minister is reading from. They could have easily given the same presentation that the minister with carriage of the bill has done herself.
The fact is this: what ministerial oversight does Ms Burch give to her portfolios and give to the decisions that she makes? It would seem to me that her staff would run the show. I am sure there are people up on level 2 watching this on the CCTV now who are perhaps nodding their head or maybe even rolling their eyes. But the fact is that the staff in Ms Burch’s office run the show, and that is a worry. The minister needs to run the show. The minister is the one who is elected. The minister is the one who is accountable to this place and also the electors of the ACT. It is the minister that must be making the decisions.
Mr Rattenbury took this debate in a different direction with regard to the Fringe Festival. There is a debate to be had about the artistic merits of what was presented at the Fringe Festival. But the issue that the Assembly opposition is raising today, given that the minister intervened in this process, given that the minister has her fingerprints
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