He ACT Liberals have done Labor a big favour.
They lanced the boil and got rid of one of Labor’s liabilities, or at least a potential liability.
It was ironic that Wayne Berry should have gone down on his administration of the Sport portfolio and not Health where he should have been more vulnerable.
It happened perhaps because all eyes were on health, whereas few had any interest in racing or the TAB. It was true, too, in the media. The electronics had a hard time explaining the background. In print, journalists had a hard time getting features and news editors interested. The major explanatory articles usually went well back.
Within the Government, too, there was little interest in racing and the TAB. Berry was allowed to get on with it. Moreover, his chief minder was away when the faeces hit the mechanical air-conditioner and the Opposition started to stalk him. Basically, he had no-one to rely on to tell him what to do, and he faltered.
The Vitab saga took a long time to unravel because even within the Opposition, the TAB saga did not get the full attention of all MLAs, and the independents expressed no interest whatever.
Racing and the TAB was for beer-swilling blue-singleted yobs who reading was limited to the form guide.
In fact, TAB turnover in Australia is about the same as the defence budget, $9 billion a year. So it was always a story about money and administration, rather than horseflesh. And that is how it has turned out to be. The background to the Vitab saga is on Page X.
The reason the Liberals have done Labor such a favour is that they had started a campaign of showing how health was being badly administered by wheeling out sick people who cannot get operations. There was every reason to think that the campaign was going to continue to the election in February.
Indeed, there was some irony in one of the patients fleeing to private health cover because she thought the public system so bad: Berry the defender of the public system was driving people to private cover.
The electorally volatile waiting lists were growing.
The new Health Minister, Terry Connolly, is much less ideologically straight-jacketed, as his administration of Urban Services showed. He is not likely to get into logjams with doctors or allow administrators and unions to allow the health budget to run away. That said, health is a poisoned chalice for Connolly. There is enough inertia in the system to give him a tough time between now and the election.
Aside for the ministerial changes, Tuesday night’s vote was the culmination of a setting of directions of government in the ACT.
Mr Berry made much of instability in the ACT as a result of the no-confidence motion. However, rigid stability comes at a price: arrogance and unaccountability. With Independents holding a balance, the Government does not always get its way and issues are resolved on merit not on party-line votes.
Tuesday night’s vote, for example, was determined during the debate: a rare things for an Australian Parliament. Usually, they have made up their mind beforehand (in the party room). At least two Independents did not make up their minds until six hours in to the eight-hour debate.
Government in the ACT is more often likely to be minority rather than majority.
Governments therefore are going to have to be accommodating and accountable. Berry failed to tell the Assembly for a month that Victoria had given notice to terminate its agreement with ACTTAB. This was misleading. This is what hanged him.
The vote showed that ministerial accountability means something in the ACT, unlike places where the Government usually holds a majority.
Connolly, observed correctly that, in the ACT context, Senate practice was more pertinent than House of Representatives practice when it came to ministerial responsibility.
In voting for the motion of no-confidence, the Legislative Assembly has set a different benchmark of ministerial responsibility from some Federal precedents.
It was accepted (as it is in Westminster and other Australian Parliaments) that a minister is not responsible for everything his (or her) public servants do, but he is responsible for things he directs or for things he ought to have done.
And he is accountable and must resign if he misleads the House recklessly or deliberately. This too is accepted in Westminster and other Australian Parliaments.
However, the practice in those places has been for an inquiry to be launched before the Minister finally loses his post (Kelly and Collins, for example). The inquiry is sometimes parliamentary, sometimes independent. Sometimes they stand aside pending the inquiry, sometimes they do not.
The difference in the ACT is that the pre-emptive inquiry route is now either closed or not necessarily accepted. The inquiry into Vitab by Professor Dennis Pearce was not accepted as a reason for postponing the no-confidence motion.
The ACT test on ministerial responsibility set on Tuesday night was set higher than elsewhere in that the minister was condemned by one crucial Independent on the ground of misleading by omission, rather than commission. Helen Szuty objected to Mr Berry’s failure to tell the Assembly for four weeks about the Victorian TAB’s pulling the pin.
Under the ACT’s standard for ministerial responsibility put into practice on Tuesday, the Minister only had to be reckless in his misleading, not deliberate. In other jurisdictions, mere recklessness, at least in practice, has not been enough.
It may well be that the differences are more in practice than theory because with Independents holding the balance the theory can be more rigorously applied. It would go out the window if a major party won a majority.
So while we have minority governments, Ministers are going to have to be more open. It will not be a question (as it is elsewhere) of Opposition only getting a ministerial scalp through garnering enough public opinion through whatever means available to make a minister an electoral liability, as in the Ros Kelly case. Rather it will be a question of persuading Independents on the merits.
In an information-rich age, it means that governments must be more open. Open governments will not lose ministers. Those who have failings to hide and persist in hiding them will get into more strife than those who acknowledge the failing early and cut their loses.