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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (7 March) . . Page.. 579 ..

MS TUCKER: Thank you. It is an interesting subject so I might as well become involved in the discussion. I will not be as long as some. A couple of things have happened recently which I have found quite amusing. Obviously the Liberal Party, the Government, can bring up what Labor did not do well in this area and it seems like there were some issues there.

I think it was in question time or something last week that a member of the Government - I cannot recall who it was - gave a very long exposition of the virtues of this Government on the issue of commercial-in-confidence and went through the principles of commercial-in-confidence that this Government had put up. It was amusing because it was such a wonderful example of what, at the time, was necessity becoming virtue when it was reflected upon.

I remember clearly that in the last Assembly Michael Moore, Paul Osborne and I were applying a lot of pressure to this Government on the issues of freedom of information and the use of commercial-in-confidence. It was in response to that that this Liberal Government came up with its principles. So, we do have them, but I think history has been rewritten a little bit in the way it is being proudly proclaimed now by the Government.

Mr Kaine: It was not Mr Moore who was doing it, was it?

MS TUCKER: That interested me as well, I must say. Anyway, we know that there has been a lot of interest in this issue, certainly through the last Assembly as well, and the principles that the Government came up with were quite useful, I thought. What is really of concern to me is the appalling lack of any systemic approach to integrating these principles into government practice, into agencies' practice. In fact, I have had an example of that quite recently in the committee I chair on education and community services.

Mr Hird: A wonderful committee.

MS TUCKER: "A wonderful committee", Mr. Hird said. Yes. I requested some contracts for the committee's information and was informed basically that these contracts were available to the committee but that the agencies concerned did not want them made public in any way and that we needed to regard them as confidential. I have pursued that. I wrote to the agencies because I was interested to know why, As members have said here and the Chief Minister has just said, we need to understand the rights here in balancing the rights of the parties to contracts.

I wrote as chair of the committee to these organisations and asked them for the reasons. I was interested to understand that. The one I have received a response from so far basically expressed the concern or made the statement that it was really advice given to them by the bureaucrats concerned; that it was the convention to ask for this commercial-in-confidence status, which obviously flies in the face of the principles of this Government. I am still pursuing that within my committee. I have just received another piece of correspondence from the Minister saying that it was not quite correct, that they have changed their position on this and that it is probably okay for the

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