Page 970 - Week 04 - Thursday, 3 May 2007
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Mrs Dunne has pursued, on a level and on a precedence and on a scale that has never been seen before.
It is easy for governments to say that they adhere to these qualities I have outlined, but it is quite another for their actions to demonstrate this. The government have said in the past that they believe that these things are core values but, again, it must be stated, their actions suggest otherwise.
Let us talk again a little bit about openness in government. An issue that has not yet been discussed is the handling of the Canberra Times freedom of information request of an ACT government department. It involved some $34,000 of expenditure, which was deleted from the information provided, ostensibly because the expenditure was not by department executives. I understand that the Canberra Times copped an earful from both Mr Corbell and his adviser when they dared raise these issues on the eve of publishing much of this material in the Canberra Times back in February. I would suggest that all government expenditure should be able to be scrutinised on request.
In another example in the last couple of months the Chief Minister has made it decidedly more difficult for the opposition to receive briefings, as I have said, on Treasury matters. I will not labour these points because I have raised them on a number of occasions in the last few days, and I was a bit stunned today when Mr Stanhope indicated to me that he knew nothing of them. But what does that tell you? The government are not on top of things. I would be horrified if my staff had dropped the ball on serious matters and a month later I knew nothing about it. It would be a very, very serious reflection on my capacity to manage my office—and it is a very serious reflection on the Chief Minister’s capacity to do the job.
Clearly the Chief Minister is taking on too many different tasks. That is quite obvious. One has to watch here what is happening. If you are part of a government, if you are part of a team, you have to have the capacity to share and delegate and that is what does not seem to be happening, and I think we are going to see more and more examples of the ball being dropped. But I will move on from that issue.
The poor attitude of the government to governance has meant that the ACT Liberal Party are now looking at other options to legislate to access information that the government should have no qualms about making publicly available. Mr Smyth spoke yesterday about the matter of the capital works progress reports, something he has doggedly pursued since last year and which I have attempted to pursue information about this year. What we were left with was having to bring in a bill to this house. I am not a fan of having more and more legislation filling that table. I am one of those, probably a minority in this place, who want to see these laws diminish. But what can you do when governments just bring down the shutters? You have got to try and legislate to have this information made available for the people of Canberra.
Other things disappear; the travel reports for ministers just quietly slid off the table. I have researched that back, as I said yesterday, to the time when Kate Carnell committed to openness in government—in fact brought in that system—and now we see that has quietly evaporated. So we may have to look at legislating in that regard as well. We will continue to pursue this until we feel that there is a commitment to those principles that Mr Stanhope espoused in 2001 but that are quietly being taken off the table.
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