Page 389 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 13 May 1992
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The problem with the proposal by Mr Humphries is that the agency will have to process the documents, and processing a request can be a very expensive business. It was because of that that the Labor Government, originally, and governments of various persuasions in different States, have uniformly followed this and have introduced a user pays regime. A simple FOI request can result in hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of clerical time in which officials are running around chasing documents and processing them. If Mr Humphries's amendments are agreed to, the agency will have to be going through that process, provided the person says, "I would like a remittal".
Let us say for argument's sake that the person's application for remittal is rejected. He may appeal that. At the end of the day the remittal is rejected and the person is told, "You have to pay your fee". The person could then throw their hands up in the air and say, "I do not want to pay the fee. I do not want the documents any more". That is quite likely. A lot of people may put in a bid for documents and a bid for remittal, but not wish to pursue the request if they are required to pay the fee and undertake the user pays regime. What Mr Humphries's amendments would do is to force the work to be done whether or not, at the end of the day, the person is prepared to pay the fee.
I cannot accept that that is necessarily an advance. It is a rather ironic proposal coming from a Liberal Party which usually extols the virtues of smaller government and user pays, and is always vigorously, particularly if there is a television camera around, extolling the virtues of avoiding waste in government. The danger with this is that we are potentially having a lot of clerical work being done for an applicant who may later decide that the information is not really worth the cost of the application fee and processing fees. We can get into quite large sums of money if there is a mass of documentation to be searched and examined. So, the Government is not prepared to accept this amendment, for those reasons.
When this punch was first telegraphed on 14 March the responsibility for FOI at that stage fell within the Chief Minister's portfolio. There has subsequently been an administrative rearrangement. There was an indication from a spokesperson for the Chief Minister that FOI ought be examined, and there may be an omnibus set of proposals brought forward later this year. Mr Humphries in his remarks on this change did highlight the fact that there have been a series of amendments to the Federal FOI Act in recent years which have not been considered in a formal way for our Act. It may well be that we do not want to go through all those processes; but we ought at least to examine to see whether our FOI Act is currently in its most effective and best state, and we intend to proceed with that.
There may be some possibility then of amending the Act to allow an application with an accompanying request for remission to have time limits on the remission decision, and perhaps fairly strict time limits on the remission decision, so that time on the primary application would begin to run only when the remission decision had been made, or a fee paid, depending on the appropriate circumstances; and perhaps a provision that a failure to make a remission decision within time would mean an automatic remission. That could at least prompt decision makers to be more swift on that original remission decision, which may look at some of the mischief that Mr Humphries was proposing to deal with.
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