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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 13 Hansard (3 December) . . Page.. 4496 ..

MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):

as essential tools in our jobs as members of this Assembly. There had been occasions when access to information had been made very difficult or had been subject to extremely heavy charges of a kind which made it very hard for members of this place, we felt, to be able to do our jobs properly.

When we came to office we dramatically reformed the operation of the Freedom of Information Act. We provided that there should be, essentially, a regime of free access, or virtually free access, to the FOI system; that access to personal information should be completely free and that other reforms effected would, we expected and hoped, make it easier to access information in a timely way which would assist people in being able to discover the nature of the things that they sought through that information. In this debate no doubt there will be some criticism from time to time about how effectively the freedom of information system operates in the ACT. Indeed, I would share some of that criticism on occasions. I do not think by any stretch of the imagination that the ACT has a perfect system of FOI; but I will say that, compared with what it was like three years ago, it is dramatically better and dramatically more accessible to those people to whom it was supposed to be accessible.

Mr Osborne has placed before the house a Bill which further expands the horizons of the FOI legislation, breaks down a further set of barriers to obtaining information and, particularly, reforms the system whereby documents are protected from access through the FOI system. As a person who has found it necessary to sponsor reform of the FOI system in the past, I believe that further reform is possible and that much in this legislation is worthy of adoption. The legislation certainly covers a large range of issues. It addresses the nature of exempt documentation. I think the issue raised in the legislation is that the onus on an organisation or agency seeking to protect documents from access by the FOI process would be such that they need to show that documents ought to be protected, rather than be able to assume the reverse. That is an argument which I think is put well in this legislation and it is one that we will probably need to pick up.

I understand it is not Mr Osborne's intention to deal with this legislation to finality tonight but to have the Bill referred to a committee in the Fourth Assembly. Mr Speaker, I certainly support that course of action. I am happy to indicate on behalf of the Government that we will support this legislation in principle tonight. I also indicate that I think much of what is in this legislation needs to be adopted and to become the law of the ACT in due course.

There are things about the Bill that I consider to be a problem in a practical sense. Although the onus should fall on the agency to prove or to show that a particular document ought to be protected from the public gaze, I think that that power to do so ought not to be constrained in a way which will undermine the operation of government and cause organisations to begin to create artificial labyrinths in which information can be hidden from the processes of FOI. That would be a most unfortunate state of affairs. It was claimed when the original freedom of information regime was first established many years ago, I think by the Commonwealth originally, that this process would lead to that very thing happening; that public servants would start to put their thoughts down in their minds and not put them on paper; that there would be arcane attempts to avoid the operation of the legislation, and so on.

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