Page 621 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 11 February 2009
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evidence to an Assembly committee in relation to proposed appropriations or accounting for the expenditure of appropriations through annual reports hearings; and, finally, documents prepared for the purposes of informing the minister to be able to answer questions in the Assembly during question time.
Some people in the community and, indeed, some people in this place may argue about what is the justification for withholding those documents and saying that they warrant protection and should not be subject to a freedom of information regime. This matter was discussed at some length in the most recent and most authoritative review of freedom of information conducted in recent times: the review conducted by Solomon in Queensland for the Queensland government. The Solomon review outlines in quite some detail issues around exemption of cabinet documents and similar exemptions. Solomon talks in some detail about the principles that underpin the need to respect those documents and to make sure that advice is given to ministers in an appropriate way.
Solomon makes it clear that it is an obligation of ministers to make sure that they are able to give full and accurate information to parliament when parliament is holding them to account through question time. That means ministers must be aware of all of the relevant issues affecting their portfolios that may be subject to parliamentary scrutiny. In turn, that means that public servants must be able to give their ministers full and frank advice on the broad range of issues that are occurring within their portfolios so that ministers can properly perform their functions in informing the parliament and understanding the context in which their portfolios are operating.
There would be some serious inhibitions on the ability of ministers to properly account to the parliament if documents that gave them advice on the operations of their portfolios and were designed to inform them of the circumstances of their portfolios for the purposes of accounting to parliament did not contain information which may be considered to be sensitive or confidential in some manner. Indeed, it would impact on the ability of public servants to give frank and fearless advice on those matters if there was the prospect that that information would be made available through a freedom of information request. For that reason, Solomon argues in his review that those types of documents should be exempted because, without them being exempted or protected in some way, it would be difficult for ministers to properly perform their duties in the parliament.
Equally, the Solomon review highlights the fact that the same argument applies for the parliament’s committees and that briefings to ministers as they prepare for and present before parliamentary committees equally need to provide the full context of issues so that the ministers can appropriately and confidently answer questions in an accountable way posed by the parliament to them.
Those are the arguments that Solomon raises in his review, and I draw members’ attention to his recommendations in that regard. It is important to stress that this review was drawn on very heavily by the commonwealth and other jurisdictions when looking at their own freedom of information acts. At recommendation 36 of his review of Queensland’s Freedom of Information Act he states:
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