Page 1338 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 27 March 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
Congress first adopted an FOI scheme in 1966. In Australia the federal FOI laws were adopted in 1982, and our law in the ACT came into force in 1989 with the rise of self-government.
The provision of government information needs to be constantly evolving as technology changes, and particularly as community attitudes and expectations change. In 1995 the Australian Law Reform Commission recognised the community’s right to government information. In fact, the ALRC report into the commonwealth freedom of information laws began with the statement:
The Review considers that more must be done to dismantle the culture of secrecy that still pervades some aspects of Australian public sector administration. The recommendations in this report are designed to give full effect to the Australian people’s right of access to government-held information.
In the time since that report was written, the ACT Freedom of Information Act has, unfortunately, changed little. In 2009 we did take the very important first step of removing conclusive certificates. However, until this bill, we had not addressed the much more challenging task to fundamentally change the underlying framework and address many of the very often recognised shortcomings of our current act.
It seems clear that the current system does not represent contemporary thinking and the way a modern government should conduct its affairs and engage with those it governs. It is fair to say that since the FOI acts were first passed in Australia relatively few significant changes have been made, until about four years ago when FOI sprang back into prominence and a number of very significant reviews were undertaken on the topic.
The most notable of those is probably the Solomon review in 2008. That review, which was subsequently adopted by the Queensland parliament, recommended significant changes to the underlying framework for freedom of information laws. Increasingly, other jurisdictions, both in Australia and around the world, are changing the way they manage government information and the systems they have in place to allow their citizens access to that information.
The New Zealand Law Reform Commission, in a 2010 discussion paper entitled “The Public’s Right to Know”, said:
There has been a worldwide trend towards legislating for freedom of access to official information. Freedom of information generally, and the importance of citizens having access to government information in particular, are also recognised in international law.
It is certainly not before time for us to address this issue and to be reforming our access to information laws. Our delay has given us the opportunity to utilise all the progress that has been made in other jurisdictions. However, it has also left us well behind the leading jurisdictions. The task for us now is to utilise the benefit of those learnings and create the best scheme for accessing government information to ensure that Canberrans really do have an open and responsive government that they can not only properly evaluate but also engage with and contribute to.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video