Page 1391 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 6 April 2011
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Basically, the point is that our taxes have paid for this information. Unless there is a good reason otherwise, we should have access to it. It is a new mindset that we are looking at—the mindset of making information available rather than concealing it. Last Saturday’s Canberra Times provides a very good reason why we should do this. In the Canberra Times last weekend there was a discussion about the problems at AMC. It was a very ill-informed discussion because it was based entirely on pieces of the Hamburger report which had been leaked by Mr Hanson—I am sorry, provided by Mr Hanson, and I am not sure how, to the Canberra Times.
Mr Hanson: It was the Burnet report.
MS LE COUTEUR: It was the Burnet report. Thank you, Mr Hanson. My point is that it was an ill-informed debate because the two reports that were relevant to it—the Hamburger report and the Burnet report—were not available to the Assembly and were not available to the public. These are reports which were paid for by the ACT taxpayers. These are reports on matters that are clearly of public interest. It strikes me that these are the sorts of reports that the public actually should have access to. I am pleased that this week the government is releasing them, but one wonders how long it might have taken if they had not already come out in the paper.
I think we need to have a presumption that government reports will be released. We have all spent time here trying to pursue government reports and trying to get information. A couple of weeks ago I asked a question about the draft waste strategy and about third bins. I asked a question without notice. I have finally got a response to that which, in fact, gives me no information. Some of the information certainly is commercial-in-confidence, but not all of it.
The government needs to start thinking about having a different presumption—that the information has been paid for by the public and is interesting to the public in many cases. The first idea should be that it is available unless there are reasons why it should not be available. I am not suggesting for one minute that everything should be published. That is clearly unworkable. It would also be incredibly boring to the public. But it is a change of mindset to openness rather than closedness.
We started to see this happen in the world with the recent natural disasters. There were some really exciting and innovative maps and other displays of what was going on. The ABC in particular did some wonderful things, using—I probably cannot pronounce this correctly—the Ushahidi platform. That word, which I cannot pronounce, means “testimony” in Swahili. That is what they used to do all their crowd-sourced information about what was actually happening in the world and in Queensland. Those are the sorts of things that we could be doing on a smaller scale in the ACT.
Paragraph (1)(b) of the motion states:
… the Commonwealth Government has made a declaration of open government;
I will quote from Lindsay Tanner’s declaration last year. He started off by saying:
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