Page 857 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 2 May 2007
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up to those noble words of 2001, didn’t they consult with the community on this issue before the event? Why didn’t they say something after their re-election—say, in early 2005? They could have said, “We have got a problem with schools. We really need to look at some that have to close. Let’s have a full, frank and open debate.” If they had been fair dinkum—if they were going to live up to the Chief Minister’s code—that is exactly what they would have done.
In terms of school closures, despite what the Chief Minister might say about his often trotted out example of Charnwood high school, that is exactly what this opposition did when in government. There was a document in 2000 that the P&C thought very highly of as a model for consultation and that we tried to include in the relevant act on several occasions in this Assembly to no avail. That is open and accountable. That is how you consult. Why didn’t they do it? It was because of the functional review, but that flies in the face of the Chief Minister’s code.
What did Mr Stanhope have to say about freedom of information as part of this code of good government? There were more pious intentions. I hear my colleague Mrs Dunne laugh at that, and well she may. She has had a lot of experience in this regard in recent months. Mr Stanhope declared:
Labor rejects the corruption, for instance, of the Freedom of Information process that has characterised the years of the Carnell-Humphries Governments, a corruption of process that saw my legitimate request for information about the Bruce Stadium redevelopment denied all the way to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
In government it has been a very different story. This is a government that places itself above the law. It did it with the bushfire coronial inquiry when the Chief Minister refused to accept the coroner’s own conclusion, saying, “No, it was not me; she is wrong.” Indeed, as I said earlier, he appealed against his own coroner, in an Australian first. The government did it about a month ago in winding back the Freedom of Information Act. As I indicated, just ask Mrs Dunne about her attempts to try to keep the government accountable over school closures and get reasonable information out of this government. Ask her about the steps the government has taken to avoid giving that information to her and other members of the public who have sought it.
Far from promoting fairness, openness and accountability and governing for the majority, this government seems to have taken an almost secret pledge to do the reverse. This is a government that prefers to govern under the cover of darkness. It is a government that does not want the opposition or the community to be able to scrutinise in any meaningful way what it is actually doing.
I mentioned the Freedom of Information Act. We recently saw the Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill passed into legislation. Far from promoting openness, accountability or any sort of transparency, it does just the opposite. This bill, debated in March, has the potential to greatly limit the freedom of the public to access information about government under FOI law.
The Freedom of Information (Amendment) Bill gives the government a new excuse to deny requests for information on the basis of the cost and difficulty involved in
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