Page 38 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 28 February 2007
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I continue to believe that in the matter of ministerial responsibility, in the strict sense of actions done in his name or on his behalf in his role as a Minister, his responsibility is to answer and explain to Parliament for errors or misdeeds, but there is no convention which would make him absolutely responsible so that he must answer for, that is, to be liable to censure for all actions done under his administration.
The Leader of the Opposition will be familiar with these words because he quoted them, of course approvingly, in a previous debate in the Assembly. At that time Mr Stefaniak described Sir Billy Snedden’s words as a very good summary of the convention and the extent of ministerial responsibility. The commonwealth government’s Guide to key elements of ministerial responsibility runs along much the same track. When referring to ministerial responsibility, it states:
… does not mean that ministers bear individual responsibility or liability for all actions of their departments.
A little later it goes on:
… would properly be held to account for matters for which they were personally responsible, or where they were aware of problems but had not acted to rectify them.
The distinguished ANU scholars Professor Richard Mulgan and Professor John Uhr note:
Discussion—
that is, of ministerial responsibility—
has been unduly dominated by mistaken interpretations of ministerial responsibility regularly recycled by opportunistic oppositions, ignorant journalists and politically naive constitutional lawyers: that ministers are personally responsible for all actions taken by their departmental subordinates and that they are required to resign for mistakes made by their subordinates. Such assumptions are clearly foreign to Australian understandings of ministerial responsibility … The main obligations on ministers are to “take responsibility” for their departments by providing answers to Parliament and the public, by imposing appropriate remedies when faults come to light ...
I have never—nor will I ever—shied away from a debate about ministerial responsibility. I do, however, make the point that this is not a subject upon which a judicial officer is either qualified or entitled to comment. Ministerial responsibility is not a concept known to the law, and the coroner’s intrusion into the matter is gratuitous at best.
As I say, I do not shy away from a debate on ministerial responsibility. But let us have the debate in the proper and fit forum—here in the Assembly.
The distinguished public servant, the late HC “Nugget” Coombes, in the 1976 report of the Royal Commission on Australian Government Administration, observed:
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