Chief Minister Kate Carnell is within her rights not to resign following the defeat of her Government’s Budget yesterday. In the ACT the proper procedure for the removal of a Chief Minister is a formal vote of no-confidence in her with seven days’ notice. Members of the Legislative Assembly then focus on that issue. It may that such a motion arises out of the events surrounding the defeat of a Budget, but it need not necessarily flow.
Mrs Carnell still has some time up her sleeve. Under the Treasurer’s advance from last year’s Budget she can still legally keep the machinery of government going while she works a way through the impasse. The impasse was created after two MLAs who usually form part of her majority – Independents Dave Rugendyke and Paul Osborne – voted against her Budget because it contained a line item of $80,000 for a safe injecting place for heroin users. Their vote was illogical, unprincipled and has unnecessarily inflicted instability on the ACT. They should have followed the more principled and responsible approach of former Liberal and now United Canberra MLA, Trevor Kaine. Mr Kaine, like Mr Rugendyke and Mr Osborne, is an opponent of the safe injecting place. He put his views forcefully when the legislation to set it up was debated. The legislation was approved by a majority of the Assembly. He then accepted defeat gracefully and acknowledged the majority had the right to have the law put into effect. He did not seek to enforce a minority position on a single issue by threatening to vote a whole Budget down.
The problem with the Rugendyke-Osborne view is that it invites the dismemberment of the Budget process. In future, Governments or Assembly majorities that approve contentious matters will have to incorporate separate funding appropriations when the items are voted into law. Alternatively they will have to present the Budget in bits, cobbling together different majorities to get different bots of it through.
Labor should never have handed such power to the two Independents in the first place. Labor should have supported the Budget. Future governance in the ACT would have been better if it were the convention that Budgets go through and that the fall or continuance government rest in separate no-confidence motions in the Chief Minister. It is now likely that the Liberals will play pay-back when Labor is in minority government. Labor has allowed hunger for power to get the better of it.
The illogic of the Independents’ position lies in the fact that their actions could at best only result in the installation of the only alternative to Mrs Carnell’s Liberals Government, a Labor Government, and Labor is even more in favour of the injecting place than the Liberals.
Now a way out must be found. It would not be good for governance for something approved into law by a majority in the Assembly to falter through failure to fund – whether it is the injecting room, new traffic laws or security cameras in Civic. That would allow future minority Governments to frustrate legislative majorities.
It seems the Budget should be divided with the line item of the injecting place excised and put in a separate Bill. The Independents could then in what they call “”clear conscience” vote for the bulk of the Budget and allow a different majority with Labor and the Green’s help pass the injecting-room Bill. It would not be ideal, but it would be better than the uncertainty of a protracted stand-off.
Liberals must rise above the temptation to pay Labor pack in the future by voting against Budgets for the sake of it or in the hope that power might come their way.