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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (21 June) . . Page.. 2299 ..

MR STANHOPE (continuing):

So who is responsible for the Territory Records Bill? Three-quarters of the cabinet. It's absurd. The damage that we are doing to principles of government in this place by this sort of behaviour really will bite us one day quite severely, just as it bit us yesterday in the Auditor-General's report when the Auditor-General reported that this government has so watered down the principle of ministerial responsibility that it virtually means nothing. Ministers in this place have sent the signal, reported on yesterday by the Auditor-General, that the only level of ministerial responsibility accepted by this government and its ministers is if they engage in criminal behaviour or if they wilfully mislead the Assembly. There is no other acceptance by this government of accepted tenets of ministerial responsibility other than that they are caught out in criminal activity or they are caught out in wilfully misleading the Assembly. That is one principle that the Auditor-General reported on yesterday, and today we are dealing with another issue in relation to the non-existence of notions of cabinet solidarity.

What are we to think of the Territory Records Bill? The best thing for us to do today is to adjourn it so that members have an opportunity to see to what extent the Executive Documents Release Bill interacts with the Territory Records Bill, the extent to which there is some capacity for what Mr Moore is seeking to achieve so that the Executive Documents Release Bill is better dealt with in the Territory Records Bill, and the extent to which the resource implications and the management implications of the Executive Documents Release Bill are covered or are relevant to the resourcing of the issues raised in the Territory Records Bill.

The Territory Records Bill provides a regime, one hopes-we have not had an opportunity to look at it yet-for the management, release, resourcing and archiving of all documents relevant to this administration. That is what it is meant to do and that is what we hope it does. The Executive Documents Release Bill deals with a single issue. It comes in over the top. It is proposed that it start before the Territory Records Bill kicks in, before the resourcing implications of that are dealt with, before it is appropriately resourced, before the records are appropriately compiled, organised, recognised and detailed. So we have this one nitpicking part of the overall need to deal comprehensively with our records without any consideration of the resource implications, the inefficiencies, or the fact that it is being done retrospectively.

The Labor Party stands by its position that we would willingly accept a six-year prospective release date in relation to cabinet documents, but we would do it in the context of an overall consideration of the records management issues that obviously quite seriously face this government. In the tabling of the Territory Records Bill today the government has acknowledged that record maintenance, as so starkly and embarrassingly revealed in the Auditor-General's reports, needs dramatic attention. It has responded today with a bill. Let us have a look at the bill and see the extent to which it deals with the issues that were so embarrassingly revealed by the Auditor-General in relation to Bruce Stadium and by the coroner in the case of the hospital implosion. Let us see how we can incorporate in that bill the issues that Mr Moore raises in his separate, outside cabinet, Executive Documents Release Bill so that we at least do this in a consistent and coherent way and that we take account of the resource implications that are relevant.

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