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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 7 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2626 ..
MRS DUNNE
: But the public interest rests not with the interests necessarily of the GDA, but in this Assembly's capacity to know what is going on and to act on it accordingly.I have no problem at all in referring an issue like this as a matter of principle to the Administration and Procedure Committee so that we do actually set up within the standing orders a means of dealing with contentious documents. This model may be the best one. But what this minister is doing is being done on the fly, on the run, knowing that his first suggestion to us was entirely untenable and was tearing at the very roots of the Westminster system which we depend upon and are supposed to uphold. He has come up with a second best option.
This is, on the face of it, a better option because the rules are being set by us and we are not signing up, as the previous amendment sought, to a confidentiality clause which is not even canvassed in here before we sign up to it, but something that would have been provided by the minister after the event. Mr Cornwell made a very good point in saying that we had no idea what we were signing up to.
The message that we are getting here today is that this minister is a minister on the ropes, a minister who is afraid to come clean with his colleagues in this place. The minister does mount an argument that it is his responsibility to protect the interests of the territory in relation to the GDA. It is the responsibility of this Assembly, each and every one of us, to protect the interests of the people of the ACT.
I would like to go back to House of Representatives Practice. I looked at the advice that was given by Mr Evans, the Clerk of the Senate, to Mr Smyth and it caused me to read further in the area. There are a couple of really interesting things here. This is about the rights of a parliament to have access to documents. The rights of a parliament to have access to documents by convention, by the practice over centuries, are much higher than anyone else's rights of access to a document.
Page 592 of House of Representatives Practice, Fourth Edition, says:
In the judgment of the High Court of Australia in Sankey v Whitlam-
I love to refer to Sankey v Whitlam, Mr Speaker-
it was held that the public interest in the administration of justice outweighed any public interest in withholding documents which belonged to a class of documents which may be protected from disclosure irrespective of their contents.
The public interest is supreme; the High Court of Australia has said that. On the same page, under how that is dealt with in parliament, House of Representatives Practice says:
By the end of the 19th century the United Kingdom Parliament was invested with the power of ordering all documents to be laid before it which were necessary for its information.
The motion that we started to debate at 11 o'clock this morning is a motion that goes to whether it is necessary for this parliament to have a document to do its job properly. We
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