The twin debacles of the Campbell Primary School procurement process and the phantom needs analysis report on aquatic facilities for Woden - each within the purview of now ex-minister Yvette Berry - are further proof we need to be done with self-government.
In both instances, the narrative the Labor government has been busily spinning is that poor Yvette Berry was let down. So very badly let down. Again.
First the minister was let down by sports and recreation bureaucrats who said they did the aquatic facility needs analysis for Woden but actually didn't.
And now she was let down, again, by her then chief of staff and then Education Department director-general who were found by the ACT Integrity Commission to have engaged in corrupt conduct around the Campbell Primary School procurement.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr told the media this week that Ms Berry had been "badly let down" by those around her in the whole Campbell Primary School fiasco.
Ms Berry, herself, said in relation to the Auditor-General's finding around the missing aquatic needs analysis for Woden that public servants had also "let the government down".
Ms Berry says she knew nothing of each disaster.
Just let down by those who are there to advise her, including her chief of staff, literally the most important person in her office, a political appointment who is her right-hand man or woman, who makes sure her working world runs as smoothly as possible. Who is there to see and hear everything and let their boss know about it.
During her tenure, Ms Berry also showed some incredible chutzpah around the whole Big Splash debate. She constantly acted like she was on team Save Big Splash and that she was somehow an independent bystander with zero agency. When she was, in fact, part of the very government standing by and watching the steady decline of the water park. Just let down again - by Access Canberra perhaps? Or the laws around kicking out recalcitrant landlords that her government had put into place?
Perhaps Ms Berry was just the unluckiest minister there ever was?
If such failures are being missed, are not being seen for what they are by our political leaders, it's time to move on.
It is sometimes difficult to understand how each of our ministers can be fully across multiple portfolios. Ms Berry was juggling education and early childhood, housing and homelessness and sport and recreation as well as being deputy chief minister. The life of an ACT minister is not an easy one. For Ms Berry, it seems as though she was called upon almost daily to answer for one crisis after another. And, to her credit, she did always front up and answer the questions.
But it's not good enough.
Don't reshuffle the deck chairs. Don't advocate for more MLAs to share the workload. Forget self-government.
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Give our state responsibilities to NSW, let us be once and for all subsumed into the state that surrounds us. Constitution be damned. Surely the federal government can still run from Capital Hill whether it's NSW or the ACT running our police, hospitals and schools? Just a few legislative tweaks here and there and we'd be right.
And then let the ACT's rates, roads and rubbish-level duties be managed by a local council. And hopefully one in which the councillors are not part of a political party. They would be motivated by what's best for the ACT, not what's best for their party. Wouldn't that be a great idea?
If the ACT economy runs on rates, taxes, fees, charges and, yes, grants, isn't there a tipping point? A critical threshold beyond which no more money can be squeezed from the ACT populace?
We are a landlocked territory. Eventually we are going to run out of space to put in more greenfield housing to generate more rate income. Or are we going to venture into protected natural spaces? And give up any semblance of the bush capital? Or do we continue allowing often poorly planned high-rises to be built, blocking out the sun across our town centres to generate the income? Or do we just keep hiking the rates ever more for the existing residents?
Do we just keep increasing our population, putting more pressure on facilities, because the only way to pay our way is out of the pocket of the people who live here, who pay the rates and the charges and the taxes? It's not like we have the back-up of something like mining royalties.
Ms Berry, meanwhile, was keen to quash the whole Integrity Commission report on Campbell Primary School. Make out that she was resigning from cabinet to stop some "parliamentary public circus" developing in the wake of the findings.
"I have no intention of giving the opposition and the Greens political party that satisfaction," she said.
And that's where it all begins and ends. Ms Berry is no babe in the woods. She is a creature of the Labor Party, a political animal. She likes to suggest her resignation was her getting one up on her political enemies. It's not. You went because what happened under your watch was wrong.
