Page 2135 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 21 June 2011
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accountable for the impact of their decisions. We recognise the important contribution that making information held by government available to the public makes to improving our decision making and service delivery.
I welcome the opportunity to outline the extent to which the government has already taken steps to improve access to government information, and one recent example is the release in full of Dr Allan Hawke’s report on the capability, capacity and effectiveness of the ACT public service. And there are many other examples of reviews and reports released in full. If people go to the ACT government directory and to individual directorate websites, they will find hundreds of thousands of pages covering reviews of government service delivery. Those reports and recommendations and government responses to those reports are also provided there for the community.
The release of these documents follows other clear examples of our preparedness to remove restrictions on access to government information, including through proposing amendments to the Freedom of Information Act which I intend to discuss further in a ministerial statement later this week.
It is also worth noting that we have the most open legislative framework for access to cabinet documents in the nation. The Territory Records Act makes cabinet papers of ACT government available to the public after just 10 years. This was a change that we brought to the Assembly and had passed here. This means that, due to the success of this government and our repeated return after three elections, in an unprecedented set of circumstances, the cabinet papers of our first year in government will be made available in March next year. For the first time, in 2011, the Territory Records Office hosted an embargoed lockup for journalists ahead of the release of records on Canberra Day this year. This deliberate facilitation of access to the ACT archives had not occurred before this year.
In addition, we are exploring how to use changes in information technology, particularly social networking technology, to improve the ways we communicate with the community. We are very supportive of looking at the potential that is provided here to improve not only our own decision making but also access to information for the people of Canberra. Web 2.0 of the government’s suite of tools facilitates more open and transparent engagement and facilitates greater innovation to deliver better services to the community. Indeed, there is a budget initiative specifically around Web 2.0 that will progress through this year.
We are looking in terms of our own systems of streamlining access to services through Canberra Connect, of building a public service network through InTACT that is common across all government agencies, enhancing flexibility and opportunities for collaboration, and also being a foundation member of the ICT research lab at NICTA.
The government is also committed to engaging with the community in meaningful, transparent, accountable, responsive and equitable ways. Given our size and our vocal and educated citizenship, the scope of our responsibilities and the space for opportunity to involve oneself as a citizen in government decision making, there must be ways to improve that collaborative process. Indeed, I am very keen to examine those ideas closely.
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