Page 649 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 11 February 2009
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volume of documents and resources that would have been used in identifying, locating and collating the documents, examining the documents and consulting on them, copying the documents, preparing an itemised schedule of the documents, and notifying the applicant of any interim or final decision. So the provision makes more explicit the grounds for considering whether a request is unreasonable and that gives guidance to both officers and the AAT in the event of a review.”
That is taken from Hansard of 8 March 2007. That is the Attorney-General, Simon Corbell.
The commitment when they came in was to make it more difficult. Of course, there are a lot of words there, but we can summarise what that was about. That was about making it harder for ordinary Canberrans and members of the Legislative Assembly to get access to documents. The Attorney-General wanted to expand the ability of the government to hide behind freedom of information law.
I think it is fair to say that some of the worst abuses of freedom of information law occurred during the school closures program and the attempts by the community to get to the bottom of the rationale for some of this. There is the still suppressed Costello review, which has been sought in various ways, but a whole range of other documents which went to the rationale of this government closing so many schools were suppressed. With many of those documents, we saw conclusive certificates used.
Mrs Dunne chased this, and chased it all the way to the AAT. Quite embarrassingly and quite instructively, it demonstrated that the minister for education, Andrew Barr, had misused conclusive certificates. I do not know how many documents he used it for, but eventually, when some of these documents were released, we saw that they were amongst the most innocuous documents that one could see.
It seems that the minister believed that the conclusive certificates were—in very much the way that Nicola Roxon described, as Mr Rattenbury quoted—“get out of jail free” cards. He figured “I can just sign a conclusive certificate and I will not have to give any of these documents.” It seems, certainly from the documents that we eventually got, that he did not even bother to look at the detail. He just applied it to a lump of documents so that he would not have to release this information. That was a clear misuse of the idea behind conclusive certificates, and the minister stands condemned for that. I think he was quite embarrassed—he certainly should be embarrassed—about the way that he used that and the way that that eventually came out in the AAT.
We also saw what happened with the Chief Minister with the issue of the Tuggeranong power station, and the debacle that that was, and the attempts by the opposition and the community to get to the bottom of the government’s handling of that. We saw thousands of pages of documents suppressed. This was from a government that said they were not going to hide behind the cloak of commercial in confidence. They were going to be open and accountable. They were going to reform the FOI Act. The only way they reformed the FOI Act was to make it harder.
In the application, we see the instruction from the top. We see the instruction from the Chief Minister about the way he sees that freedom of information laws should be applied by public servants, in the policy document. It said:
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