Page 1756 - Week 05 - Thursday, 11 May 2017
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Well, it will not, certainly not today. All we are going to do today is delay open government. That is what this bill does: delay. Instead of delivering open government, we are delaying open government, and it is because the Greens again have caved. They have been very good at that this week. They have been very good at doing exactly what their Labor masters required them to do.
Let me go on to refer to what Mr Rattenbury said before the election—because it gets better, members—when he was a believer in open government. He said:
The Greens do not believe we need to wait until 2018…
Members, the Greens did not believe that we need to wait until 2018. No, no, no; we do not. He went on:
I believe that there is almost one year, with the date I propose—1 July 2017—
that is the day we are changing today, members—
to bring this act into force. I believe that that allows enough time for the systems to be put in place and for the training to take place that will need to occur. I note that most of the Queensland Right to Information Act commenced in one month and was entirely commenced in less than six months. To give this some context, at the same time I recognise that it is a significant reform and changes will need to be made. Those who work in various government agencies will need to make adjustments. We will need to engage with the Ombudsman to prepare for this system. I think that is a good compromise position. The one we can accept in order to move forward on this is the proposal to commence on 1 July 2017.
Not so much anymore. We all agreed, and Mrs Dunne observed at the time that:
The counterproposal put forward by the government to spread this out to July 2018, essentially two years down the track, I think is a sign the government is not really committed to this process.
Well, it would seem that it is not just the Labor Party that is no longer committed to the process, but also Mr Rattenbury. If you think that is not enough, I will go back to Mr Rattenbury, because he was pretty staunch back then, members. This is a good one:
… at the end of the day, sometimes you need to set a deadline to get places. We have set a deadline today.
There you go. We are going nowhere, because if you have got to set a deadline like that to go somewhere, it turns out we are going nowhere today. The only place we are going is to more delay.
That has caused a little bit of mirth and amusement in my office as we dug into Mr Rattenbury’s quotes. But as we have seen from the Greens this week, their propensity to say one thing before an election and then another afterwards once they get into bed with the government and their parliamentary agreements and when all is hunky-dory on the top floor together is quite remarkable.
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