Kelvin Thomson (Wills, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Public Accountability and Human Services) Share this | Hansard source

As shadow minister for public accountability, one of my tasks is to promote the importance for Australia of high standards of ministerial conduct and public accountability and to draw to public attention government departures from appropriate standards of accountability. Sadly, it is the case that the Howard decade has seen a serious decline in standards of ministerial accountability. The writer Shaun Carney referred to this in the Age on Saturday and academic Patrick Weller referred to it in the Australian today. Patrick Weller commenced his article with this lament:

How is it that we have in theory a system of responsible government, though no one is prepared to accept responsibility when things go wrong?

Shaun Carney concluded his article, titled ‘The end of responsibility’, by saying:

Direct responsibility at the ministerial level is almost certainly dead in federal politics.

What the AWB affair shows is not so much that ministers are now responsible for nothing beyond the perimeters of their personal workspace but that it is becoming a matter of outraged amusement for most ministers should anyone dare suggest that it should be otherwise.

It has not always been so. The start of the Howard decade was characterised by the rigorous enforcement of the code of ministerial conduct. It saw ministers and parliamentary secretaries go down like ninepins for breaches of the code and failure to properly handle conflicts of interest. So the Prime Minister simply stopped enforcing his code, and we started hearing more and more about the escape clauses. For example, A guide on key elements of ministerial responsibility states that ministerial responsibility does not mean that ministers bear individual liability for all actions of their departments. It says that, where they neither knew nor should have known about matters of departmental administration which come under scrutiny, it is not unreasonable to expect that the secretary or some other senior officer will take the responsibility.

The flip side of this, of course, is that if ministers should have known about matters of departmental administration which come under scrutiny they must accept responsibility. But things have now degenerated to the point where this is completely ignored and the Prime Minister demands proof that ministers have actually read documents addressed to them. The government revels in its incompetence. It does not matter how strong the evidence is that Howard government ministers knew or should have known of the AWB kickbacks. For example—

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