March 23, 2007
John Warhurst has an op-ed in the Canberra Times on ministerial responsibility. He says that this doctrine is central to the way our system of responsible government operates.
Responsible government is about the link between citizens and their representatives. More particularly, it is the way that ministers, collectively and individually, are held responsible for their actions on behalf of the people that elected them.Individual ministerial responsibility in theory has two parts to it......Individual ministers, such as Campbell and Santoro, should be held responsible both for their own actions and for the actions of their departments. It is the only way departments can be held accountable.
Warhurst says that Ministers Campbell and Santoro have departed for personal sins, though in Campbell's case very much a peccadillo. Even 'peccadillo' overstates the Campbell event.
Warhurst goes on to say:
...it should be recognised that neither resignation goes to the heart of what the Government has stood for in terms of policy. They are not resignations brought about because of the administration of refugee and asylum-seeker policy by the Immigration department or of the AWB scandal by the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade or of the Iraq War by the intelligence agencies or any of the other major planks on which the Government has stood. The scalps have not included Philip Ruddock or Amanda Vanstone or Mark Vaile or Alexander Downer or even a junior minister on this account.
This does not mean that no one in the Government has deserved to be held to account under the doctrine of ministerial responsibility. What it does mean is that the way ministerial responsibility works in Australia is that personal rather than policy failures are much more likely to bring a minister down.
So who is responsible for policy failures? Presumably parliament can try to hold the government of the day responsible. What if the executive controls parliament--both the House and the Senate, as is the situation now?
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The problem, independent of whoever has the majority in the House of Reps, is clear enough, but what can be done about it?