Page 3319 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 14 November 2007
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the light in; instead it has been doing business in the darkest cellars. Far from reviewing the FOI system to promote transparency, it has raised to the level of an art form the abuse of the system to hide from accountability, to quash potentially embarrassing information. In particular, it has cynically used loopholes to sabotage the extensive review provisions built into the existing legislation.
The worst example has been the abuse of conclusive certificates. These certificates were intended to be used in exceptional circumstances for documents that are so sensitive that even the reviewer should not see them—things such as national security matters and the like. Emboldened by the decisions in the McKinnon case last year, the Stanhope government have used them for documents that they do not want the reviewer to see, because if the reviewer saw them it would be obvious that there was no basis for their suppression. Towards 2020 is a prime example of how the government have become an abuser of the FOI system. Literally thousands of pages of school closure documents were suppressed out of pure political cynicism.
I have come to the conclusion that the only way to make FOI work in the ACT is to remove the mechanism of conclusive certificates as they relate to territory documents. Frankly, I do not believe there is any legitimate use for them in a place like the ACT in relation to cabinet documents or internal working documents, and it is not something that this government can be trusted with. This bill puts the ACT process under closer public scrutiny by taking away a minister’s power to issue a conclusive certificate.
The laws I have introduced today are a direct result, as I have said, of my own experiences and those of other members of the community in our attempts to get to the bottom of the Stanhope government’s decision over school closures. In doing so, the Canberra Liberals are seeking to create a fairer and more transparent government, while the Stanhope government is running in the opposite direction.
Part 1.4 of the schedule amends the Law Officer Act 1992 to give statutory recognition to the ACT model litigant guidelines. Clause 1.24 gives new powers and responsibilities to the Attorney-General. Clause 1.25 requires the Attorney-General to produce and publish model litigant guidelines and requires that all people performing territory legal work comply with the guidelines.
New part 5AC of the principal act requires that the chief executive of the Attorney-General’s department report on compliance with the model litigant guidelines and report any breaches that have been brought to the public’s attention. Again, this is a simple change that makes sure that people serving the public are doing just that, whether they are public lawyers or people employed by the public to act on behalf of the government, so that they are actually serving the people who pay for the government.
The model litigant guidelines already exist. This legislation raises their status in a way that ensures that people will have a better regard for the operation of the model litigant guidelines. In a sense, it does not create much work for the attorney, but the passage of this bill would create an opportunity for a review of the model litigant guidelines, to have them published and to give them some status. It would be possible
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