Page 977 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 31 March 1993
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This is not the type of legislation that ensures closed government in the sort of rhetoric that Mr Moore might want to employ. We have a Freedom of Information Act and information can, provided it meets the criteria of that Act, be released.
Mr Moore: Look at what it costs.
MR CONNOLLY: From time to time we make exemptions for members in the public interest. I checked recently with the office of the New South Wales Government that is responsible for FOI and asked whether they ever made exemptions for members of parliament on public interest grounds, and I was told that, no, they never have.
Mr Stevenson: Did you check with Victoria?
MR CONNOLLY: Under a Liberal government the Victorians are about to abolish their FOI regime, and the Liberal Government in New South Wales never gives exemptions. So you people opposite really should look at what your colleagues are doing elsewhere. The simple fact that you have secrecy provisions does not mean that you necessarily have closed governments. Many Acts of this Assembly have specific secrecy provisions - the Community Advocate Act, the Health Services Act, the Legal Aid Act, the Occupational Health and Safety Act.
Indeed, a private members Bill that was introduced and passed by this Assembly only last year had a secrecy provision. That was the Epidemiological Studies (Confidentiality) Act - a private members Bill introduced by none other than Mr Moore. So, while Mr Moore puts forward a Bill, in the heat of public controversy about documents leaked to the Canberra Times and fuming editorials from the Canberra Times about the need for open government, and makes lots of rhetoric about open government, he has to acknowledge that when there is an area he is particularly interested in it may be necessary to have secrecy provisions.
The fundamental difference, he would say, is that the Epidemiological Studies (Confidentiality) Act is protecting information relating to private people, not the Government's information. So is this Act. This Act is protecting rating information, all manner of data that is collected by governments relating to individuals, and it is saying that bureaucrats, people who work for the Government, have a duty to protect that information. It can be made available under the Freedom of Information Act and other provisions, but bureaucrats, or anyone else for that matter, cannot take it upon themselves to take government information and disseminate it to whomever they want to disseminate it to.
That is not to say that one will always conduct criminal proceedings when information finds its way into the hands of journalists, but I think that all members, when they think about this, would acknowledge that there is a need for this type of protection. For example, an ill-advised criminal officer in Mr Wood's department - not that there is any such person - could, by being employed in certain areas of the department, make a very large sum of money by selling to developers information that they came across in the course of their work. An officer in my Housing Trust could potentially enrich himself by selling material to developers. Again there is no evidence that this sort of thing happens.
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