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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 2 Hansard (29 February) . . Page.. 356 ..
MR HUMPHRIES (continuing):
Let me ask members in this place to judge for themselves. If releasing 90 per cent of information in full or in part to people is a veil of secrecy, what would you call releasing 67 per cent of information to people? I would call it a tarpaulin of stealth, compared with a mere veil of secrecy. I will let me Corbell think of a term for himself.
We have seen that Labor was slower, it was more secretive and under them it was much more costly to obtain access to FOI. Let members and the community judge for themselves who is being secretive about FOI and who is not.
MR HIRD: I ask a supplementary question. Can the Attorney advise the parliament why the Government's performance has improved over that of the previous Government?
Mr Kaine: Just good luck.
MR HUMPHRIES: No, not just good luck. It does appear as if there were some good reasons why there was a difference in the approach between the two governments. I have a memorandum dated 10 March 1993, headed "Freedom of Information Administration", from the Attorney-General's Department under the former Government. It has some very interesting reflections on the way in which the former Government approached freedom of information. This note is addressed to the senior private secretary to my predecessor as Attorney-General. It says in part:
You also made comments in relation to the processing of requests by agencies before a decision is taken on remission of the application fee.
This is the fee that we have now done away with in most cases. The memorandum goes on:
This has been an ongoing problem since Mr Humphries' amendment was passed early last year. Requests are now valid from the time they are received by the FOI Office provided that the application fee is paid or remission of the fee is sought. This means that there is additional pressure on agencies to make a decision on the statutory deadline, because the time of decision-making has been considerably shortened, work needs to begin from the time the request is received by the agency.
Because of this, there has been a tendency on the part of some agencies since Mr Humphries' amendment was passed, to delay the decision on remission to a point where the decision-maker is locked into deciding to remit the fee.
The FOI Office has applied a number of strategies to ensure prompt decision-making in relation to the application fee all of which have had a follow-up element built in. None of these strategies has worked.
What you saw in this arrangement, clearly, was - - -
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