Tasmania's government has been thrown into further disarray, with a second minister in less than a month resigning from Premier Jeremy Rockliff's Cabinet. The latest departure deepens a period of instability that has dominated proceedings in the state's Parliament and left the Premier facing sustained questioning over the conduct of his ministers.
Racing Minister Jane Howlett stepped down shortly before question time, just as she was due to face heavy scrutiny over her taxpayer-funded legal bills and accusations that she had misled Parliament. Her resignation left not just one empty chair on the government benches, but two, underscoring the scale of the turmoil confronting the administration.
The member for Lyons said that relentless personal and political attacks had become a significant distraction for the government, one that she could not allow to continue. She framed her decision as an attempt to remove that distraction, describing what she called a pattern of sustained personal and political attack directed at her.
Her exit follows the resignation of Madeleine Ogilvie from Cabinet two and a half weeks earlier, over allegations that Ogilvie had misled Parliament about her own undisclosed court action. Since then, Howlett had come under increased scrutiny over her own legal bills, which were paid for by taxpayers, keeping the issue firmly in the spotlight.
Today those bills were revealed to have increased to 405,000 dollars, about 100,000 dollars higher than they had been six months earlier. The rising figure intensified pressure on the minister and fed the questions that were awaiting her in the chamber before she chose to resign.
A committee heard yesterday that Howlett's office had been made aware of Tas Racing communications that broke caretaker conventions during last year's state election. That account conflicted with Howlett's own statements to Parliament and with a statutory declaration tabled by the adviser in question, who stated he did not have knowledge of the planned public communications.
Premier Rockliff labelled the line of questioning grubby and pointed to legal requirements, refusing to use the cover of parliamentary privilege to reveal more, saying he would not say in the chamber what he would not say outside it. The Greens pressed for an admission that his former ministers had broken the code of conduct, but did not get one, with two more days of questioning still to come.