Page 1050 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 20 April 1994
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MR CONNOLLY: My goodness! Could there be collusion between the Liberals and Mr Berry in asking questions about improper use of documents? Madam Speaker, I can shortly answer Mr Berry by saying that there are no circumstances in which as a Minister of this Labor Government I would release police files, police records or police information to anyone, let alone members who may be personal friends of mine and members of Labor front benches in other parts of Australia.
The practice relating to access to criminal records from the AFP is very clear. A document tabled during the debate last week, which I am happy to table again, makes it clear that the Australian Federal Police would provide me with such records only if it was necessary for me to know for the purposes of conducting my official capacities as Attorney-General of the Australian Capital Territory. I would expect that if I were to ring the assistant commissioner and say, "I want to know the criminal records of some people that my mates in the Labor Opposition in Victoria are pursuing", the assistant commissioner would quite rightly say, "Mr Attorney, I cannot provide you with that information". That is the way it should be.
There is a fundamental issue at stake here that has been undermined by this cavalier attitude of the Liberals opposite - although I notice that Mrs Carnell did say in the paper yesterday that it would be unacceptable to use police records for that purpose, but I understand that she is trying to back-pedal as quickly as possible from that position. TheAge, this morning, in its editorial, said this:
Whatever the truth -
and this is whatever the truth of whether this revealed anything sinister, and for the purposes of this point it matters not whether it did or it did not; I will accept, for the purposes of the argument, that it did -
the fact remains: Mr Reynolds' actions were a breach of convention. Police records are not, and should not, be made available to ministers on demand. Still less should they be handed to a political party.
Madam Speaker, how correct. If the records of the Australian Federal Police - which, by definition, are linked into Australian criminal records across Australia, because we are a federal system - are available for political parties to pass around willy-nilly to their mates around Australia to run political point scoring exercises, as we have seen here, to get a ministerial scalp, citizens of this country could well be expected to lose confidence in the police force. The politicisation of a police force by Ministers using access to secret police files for partisan political purposes is one - - -
Mr De Domenico: Secret police files?
MR CONNOLLY: Police files are, quite properly, secret, Madam Speaker - and so they should be. I have not heard even the most passionate proponents of open government suggesting that we should set up a little computer terminal in the police foyer so that people can come in and tap into the police criminal records database. That material is quite properly regarded as secret information, as information to be used only for official purposes. If it is used for grubby partisan political purposes - as the Victorian
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