Page 3316 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 14 November 2007
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I have great pleasure today in presenting the Government Transparency Legislation Amendment Bill. It does not come with an explanatory statement at this stage because of some changes that the Parliamentary Counsel and I made yesterday afternoon. There was some renumbering; it will be circulated and I will seek leave to table it later today or tomorrow. I apologise to members for that.
The bill being introduced today is the result of my experiences and those of other members of the Canberra community over the last year, in our attempts to obtain information about the motivations of the Stanhope government in its decision to close 23 schools in Canberra. We all remember that in April 2006 the new minister for education and new member of the Legislative Assembly, Mr Barr, made commitments to openness. He said in this place on a number of occasions that everything in relation to school closures would be on the table. Unfortunately, that was the first of the big lies about school closures. Actually, it was not the first of the big lies; the first big lie was when the government said it would not close schools.
My experiences as the shadow minister for education, and those of countless members of the community over the last year, continuing to this day, have been that the Stanhope government’s and Mr Barr’s commitments to openness and accountability are mere words and nothing else. These amendments today begin what the Canberra Liberals see as being a very overdue revamp of the Freedom of Information Act. These first steps are taken as a result of my experiences and the experiences of our constituents over the last year.
I will give a little bit of context and a reason for my passion on this subject. Back in 1982, when the Commonwealth freedom of information legislation was introduced, I was an FOI officer. I helped to set up the FOI arrangements in the commonwealth department of education before the act was commenced, and I was an FOI officer working on the release of documents for some time after the commencement of the act in 1982.
Over the years, I have had considerable contact with freedom of information matters. When I was a staffer to a minister in this place, it was one of the things I was very passionate about that we should do properly. One of the first occasions when I had concerns about the operation of freedom of information in the ACT came about when an official rang me and said, “We’ve got this FOI request about a matter and there are some documents here which may be inconvenient.”
The words used were “inconvenient” or “might embarrass the minister if they were released”. The official asked: “What do you want me to do?” I am a person who, I hope, lives by my principles. I said to the official: “It’s your job to tell us that you have released a document so as to give us some warning that something might blow up, but it’s not your job to come to me or to the minister and ask for permission for that document to be released. You have to apply the act as it stands and not take into consideration whether or not my boss would be embarrassed by it. He’s a big man; he has to look after himself.”
That is the principle that I have always applied in the application of the Freedom of Information Act, in and out of government, as a public servant or as a ministerial
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