Page 2593 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 24 August 1993
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Mrs Carnell: A fee.
MR CONNOLLY: No; two sets of fees. My understanding was that they were not charged the $20 fee, but Mr Humphries advises me that his advice is that they are. A reading of the Act would indicate that they are not, but we will give you the benefit of the doubt and we will not apply my more generous reading. They are charged $20 and they are charged a fee for the photocopying of documents. So there is a fee which accrues as time goes on at, incidentally, twice the rate that is charged in the ACT - 20c per page, as opposed to 10c per page. So fees are charged to politicians in Victoria; fees are charged to politicians in New South Wales; fees are charged to politicians in Queensland; we do not know about Western Australia; fees are charged to politicians in South Australia. The only State which I was not aware of this morning was Tasmania; but I suspect that neither was Mrs Carnell aware of Tasmania this morning, or she would have said so.
We are not out of kilter with practice in other jurisdictions; far from it. We have a public interest test. Fees are remitted in some 40 per cent of cases. Access to information under freedom of information in this Territory is similar to other jurisdictions and the system has not changed over time. The level at which remissions are granted under this administration, coincidentally, is running at about the same as the level at which remissions were granted when you were in power. The only difference is that we are granting access to rather more material and we are refusing access to rather less material. We are refusing access to some 3 per cent of material, as opposed to some 9.8 per cent when you were in power. So, Madam Speaker, we have a freedom of information system which is working well.
Of course, there are other ways that members can get access to information, as Mr Berry pointed out this morning. Members of parliament have access to questions on notice, which is a very powerful tool. They can use it widely. Mr Cornwell uses it extremely widely. He has asked some 200 questions, I think, in relation to the Housing Trust. That is his right; he can ask those questions. He gets answers in many cases. It is a very time consuming and expensive exercise from the department's point of view. We actually did a monitoring of that during one month. I was interested to see what the level of cost was in answering questions from members, and it was working out for the month of April at about $105 per question in terms of the time of officers. I had asked my officials to monitor that and that was the information. If you apply that over some 200 Housing Trust questions, that has generated about $20,000 worth of bureaucratic effort. Mr Cornwell, as a member of this Assembly, is entitled to ask questions and he gets answers. It is also a Minister's entitlement to say, in appropriate cases, that the resources required to give a full answer would not justify a full answer being given, and that reply is not uncommonly given.
Members also have access to information through the Estimates Committee process, although Liberal members probably would not want to focus on that too often. During last year's Estimates Committee many Liberal members were conspicuous by their lack of enthusiastic application to asking questions during the Estimates Committee.
Mr De Domenico: Tune in this time.
MR CONNOLLY: I hope, Mr De Domenico, that we will all do better this year.
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