Page 3320 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 14 November 2007
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in the future for tribunals, magistrates and judges to comment adversely if a public lawyer, a lawyer acting on behalf of the territory, did not comply with the model litigant guidelines. That would be a considerable rebuke to a lawyer, and that is why we have done this.
The experience that prompts me to do this is the experience that I have had in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and that other people have had in trying to make AD(JR) cases and the like in the Supreme Court. The obfuscation they have experienced at the hands of government lawyers shows that they are not working in a spirit of openness and cooperation.
It is timely that this legislation has been introduced today because it coincides fairly roughly with the report of the independent audit into the state of free speech in Australia, chaired and compiled by Irene Moss AO, which was published on 5 November. I commend the 300-odd pages to the attorney and to the Chief Minister, the bastion of free speech and human rights in the ACT, because I think it is very sobering reading.
The ACT does not get much of a guernsey because we are only a small jurisdiction, but there are many lessons in this piece of reporting that we should be taking home. It will certainly be the bible, to an extent, that the Canberra Liberals will be using when they undertake their reform of administrative law in relation to access to freedom of information. It is timely to quote from Irene Moss’s report in relation to freedom of information. In her summary in relation to freedom of information she says:
FOI laws work effectively and reasonably consistently when they are used to provide access to personal information … A range of factors limit their effectiveness in ensuring access to documents relevant to government accountability …
That was the very reason for them in the first place. She goes on to say:
No government, federal, state or territory, has taken sustained measures to deal with an enduring “culture of secrecy” still evident in many agencies. There are few visible, consistent advocates of open government principles, within government systems and leadership on FOI is lacking.
Today, the Canberra Liberals are taking leadership in relation to FOI in the ACT. We will see the Stanhope government come scurrying afterwards. In February and March 2001, Jon Stanhope made great commitments to amend the Freedom of Information Act, and he has done nothing. Today, the Canberra Liberals are starting to make the changes that he said he would make in 2001. We are taking the leadership that has until now been lacking.
It is timely that we talk about some things relating to the culture. There have been a number of reviews of the Freedom of Information Act. In 2006, the Commonwealth Ombudsman reviewed the commonwealth Freedom of Information Act. He said:
A person’s enjoyment of the rights conferred by the FOI Act should not depend on the agency to which their FOI request is made. There should be a uniform
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