Page 222 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 10 December 2008
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assist it in scrutinising the appropriation bill and a motion was moved by the previous Greens’ member, Dr Deb Foskey, on this issue. Mrs Dunne also introduced the Government Transparency Legislation Amendment Bill during the last Assembly, which also required, amongst other things, the publication of the review.
We have heard the arguments from all parties explaining the range of reasons why the public should be entitled to read this document or why it should be protected from release because it should be afforded confidentiality as a cabinet document. The government had told us that the functional and strategic review has informed a number of major financial and budgetary decisions. Yet the public accounts committee, which has the job of scrutinising exactly those expenditures, was not given access to it. Therefore, members of the Assembly have not been given the opportunity to provide their views and properly debate the merits of the decisions taken by the government and the executive.
Tomorrow we will be debating the adoption of the Latimer House principles by the Legislative Assembly. These principles place particular importance on the need for the legislature to contribute to and thoroughly scrutinise appropriation decisions and bills rather than leaving this solely to the executive. As everyone in this place is well aware, open and transparent government is a key part of the Greens’ agenda for this Assembly and a range of measures has and will be introduced to prevent events like this from occurring again.
There are some very severe impacts that the community has felt as a result of this review. The community has felt the results of the functional review and has never had the opportunity to see it. Not only that, we certainly never saw a social impact analysis. We do not know what criteria the functional review applied to its topic. We do not even know what the terms of reference were or who was consulted. We have reason to believe that some of the assumptions on which the review was based are deeply flawed.
When the last Assembly debated a motion on this issue Mr Stanhope said:
This is a cabinet document. Members are well aware that documents prepared for cabinet, under ACT legislation, are embargoed for a minimum period of 10 years. The government will not be tabling this document today. The motion is, as we all know, simply base politics—at its best; it is vexatious at worst—and displays a complete lack of understanding or support for how cabinet government works.
I find this statement most disappointing and take the opportunity to assure members of the public that the Greens will do all we can to ensure this will not be the case in this Assembly. Standards of accountability will increase significantly and no longer will the government treat the Assembly with the contempt apparent in this statement. This motion is not base politics and it is an insult to the democratic institution that we are part of to suggest that it is vexatious.
As members of this Assembly we have a responsibility to do all we can to access as much information as we can to allow us to make the best contribution to policy formulation that we can. We do recognise that there will be a tension between cabinet-in-confidence material and what should properly be in the public domain.
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