Page 353 - Week 02 - Thursday, 8 March 2007
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everything that Professor Snell, Dr Klugman and all the other commentators on the Freedom of Information Act had predicted as soon as the McKinnon case came down.
The McKinnon decision was a very narrow decision and a very narrow victory for governments. There is much in the decision that does not give as much heart as people might first think to governments’ capacity to close off lines of inquiry. But the general thrust of the interpretation of governments and the convenient interpretation for governments is that it is now open season on conclusive certificates. Every time something comes up that is slightly inconvenient we will see conclusive certificates because the test of public interest is very narrow and anything that is not convenient to Andrew Barr, Jon Stanhope or Simon Corbell will cease to be in the public interest and we will continue to see conclusive certificates.
The federal Labor Party, as Dr Foskey has pointed out, has been very strong in criticism of the decision and criticism of government use of conclusive certificates. In this territory we have seen this government, at the very first opportunity, jump on the post-McKinnon decision bandwagon, and we now have the issuing of conclusive certificates in a completely unjustified way, an absolutely unjustified way.
If this minister and his officials cannot demonstrate to the AAT that there is public interest in withholding this information, the information should not be withheld. At the moment, the tribunal does not have the capacity to make that decision. The only capacity it has is to make a decision about whether the people who issued the certificate were acting rationally at the time.
I would submit that the people who made the decision were not acting rationally at the time because they had an irrational desire to protect their political masters from exposing the bad decision making that they made over school closures. That is not a good enough reason to limit my access and, through me, the community’s access to the decision-making process that underpinned the school closures that plagued this community last year and will continue to plague communities for the next three to five years. What we actually see is decision making that impacts on the day-to-day operations of families being obscured because of the government’s capacity to refer—
MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Gentleman): Order! Mrs Dunne, it has been brought to my attention that, ironically, there could be contravention here of the sub judice rule in that I understand you have an application at the moment before a court and you are going into the very aspects that could be talked about in that case. I just draw your attention to that and remind you of the sub judice rule.
MRS DUNNE: Thank you, Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker. I will be mindful of the sub judice rule. It is ironic that the application of conclusive certificates is designed in this case to impede people’s access to information. They were legitimately promised by Jon Stanhope when he was the Leader of the Opposition and by Andrew Barr in this place on a number of occasions over the last few years.
The whole tenor of the Freedom of Information Act needs substantial review. The tinkering that we have here today is simply that; it is tinkering. There have been a few bits added. Although we are supporting some of these amendments, I think that it is doubtful that we need to have mirror legislation that completely copies the federal
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