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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4322 ..

MR SPEAKER (continuing):

On the afternoon of 22 November I received by facsimile a letter from Freehill Hollingdale and Page on behalf of their client Lend Lease. The letter, which I table, gave a background to the documents, claiming that some of the documents contained financial information which, due to its commercial sensitivity, was critical to Lend Lease. The letter asked that, pursuant to standing order 212, I decline permission for other persons to inspect the documents that had been tabled and that I communicate the decision within the Assembly. The letter proposed that Freehills meet with me and identify those documents which their client maintained were sensitive to it. This was done on Monday, 25 November.

Standing order 212 provides:

All papers and documents presented to the Assembly and not authorised for publication may be made available to members, and, with the permission of the Speaker, may be inspected by other persons or copies thereof or extracts therefrom may be made.

All papers presented to the Assembly are made available to members and, depending on the availability of copies, the overwhelming majority are made available to other persons. Standing order 212 does make provision for the Assembly to authorise the publication of documents presented to the Assembly, and it is open to any member in due course to give notice of a motion to authorise publication of documents presented and the matter would be up to the Assembly to decide.

Occasionally, because of concerns relating to the protection that is available to the publication of documents not authorised for publication in the event of civil or criminal proceedings, copies are not made available to other persons unless the Assembly has agreed to a motion authorising their publication. Also, on one occasion there was concern about the publication to the press of a tabled document which included an article purporting to give instructions on how to manufacture home-made explosives. In that event, though interest was shown, no request was received and no decision made.

Having considered the representations made to me concerning the sensitivity of certain of the documents presented, and having considered the contents of the documents in question, I decided to use the discretion given to me as Speaker by standing order 212 and not give permission for other persons to inspect the documents or to take copies of them or extracts from them, and to report this decision to the Assembly. I have also asked that legal advice be sought as to whether publication of the documents to persons other than members, particularly the 10 documents nominated as containing sensitive information - that is 10 of the 29 - may be actionable.

Ms McRae: Mr Speaker, on a point of order: Are you saying that in such a situation a member should put a motion on the notice paper requesting the publication of those documents? Is that what you are suggesting is the correct action? Am I understanding right?

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