Page 3920 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 5 December 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
possible for future tribunals, magistrates and judges to comment adversely if a public lawyer or a lawyer acting on behalf of the territory did not comply with the model litigant guidelines; this would be a considerable rebuke for 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 community members have had in trying to make AD(JR) cases and the like in the Supreme Court. The obfuscation that we 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 compiled from the internal audit on the state of free speech in Australia chaired by Irene Moss, AO, which was published on 5 November. I commend the 300-odd page document to the attorney and to the Chief Minister, who have both claimed to be bastions of free speech and human rights in the ACT. It makes sobering reading.
There is not much direct reference to the ACT in the report, because it is a small jurisdiction, but there are many lessons in this piece of reporting that we should be taking into account. 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 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 is the very reason for them in the first place. The Freedom of Information Act was never really designed to give people access to their own documents; it was designed to give the people of Australia access to documents in relation to how government works and what a government was thinking about when it made particular decisions. Irene Moss 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.
That is the culture of secrecy I experienced as a ministerial adviser when someone said to me, “Perhaps we should not release this because it might embarrass the minister.” That culture of secrecy still exists today. Irene Moss goes on to say:
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 coming scurrying afterwards. In February and March 2001, Jon Stanhope made great commitments to amend the Freedom of Information Act, but he has done nothing. Today, the Canberra Liberals are starting to
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .