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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 8 Hansard (26 June) . . Page.. 2196 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

that were previously a considerable barrier to access to FOI. There were occasions when members of this Government, then Opposition, made applications for information, particularly from the Department of Health, and were told, "Yes, the information will be available to you. That will be $300, please", or whatever it might be. I forget the figures. They were certainly quite significant.

VITAB, I am reminded, was one such case. We were told that the information would come. It was information about matters of vital public interest to the Territory. The wasting, as it turned out ultimately to be, of public money by a Minister who was totally incompetent cost Territory taxpayers $4m at the end of the day. We asked for information about that. We were told that the request was not in the public interest and, therefore, no fees would be remitted. As I recall, hundreds of dollars were to be charged to people who wanted to get access to that information. It was not just politicians; it was people all over the Territory who were seeking access to information about the activities of government in this Territory.

I stand in this place extremely proud. If I do nothing more in the area of FOI, I will be able to rest on my laurels and say that we have achieved something extremely important in this area, and that is to make access to personal information under FOI completely free and to make access to information of a non-personal nature, except for a flat application fee of, I think, about $40 - I forget what the figure is - almost completely free as well. There is a fee that cuts in if one has to collect a certain amount - several hundred pages, I think - of information or if a certain volume of work is required to produce it. But essentially information for most people will be effectively, with a small threshold fee, absolutely free. That is the context in which we are debating FOI today. My response to Mr Osborne's concern about the hoops that his staff person had to go through is: Do not imagine that they have begun since the changes in the FOI legislation that we have been responsible for; they have been a feature of the system for a very long period of time. I hope that we can reduce the incidence of that kind of thing, but it is not the result of anything that this Government has initiated.

The other point that I want to make is that the decentralisation of FOI functions, I think, has also been an important task. There is no doubt in my mind that one of the side effects of centralisation in an FOI office was considerable delay in making decisions about releasing FOI information. It used to be the case that a line area would receive a request for information. The request usually went to line areas. The line area then referred the issue off to the central office. The central office would do some work and then get back to the line area. There would be some debate to and fro, and a very significant proportion of FOI requests under that arrangement were not met within time. There are statutory limits to be met, and it was very often the case that those statutory limits were not complied with under those arrangements. It ill becomes anyone who was responsible for that system, as Ms Follett was, to complain about changes in the system that result in line areas having to meet these responsibilities themselves. I think it is extremely appropriate that every department in this Territory address the question of its responsibilities under FOI, produce its own working system and its own guidelines and report to those rules and guidelines in each annual report. That is why this legislation is framed as it is.

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