Page 1753 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 21 August 2007
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What we saw from the outset was a community seeking answers. Despite the assurances of this government, those answers were not forthcoming and the information that would allow people to draw their own inferences was not forthcoming. I, along with other members of the community, started a rather fruitless process under freedom of information provisions. We should look at what this government has said in the past about freedom of information, including, most importantly, the very grand statements made by the then Leader of the Opposition in a series of speeches in relation to good governance. I will quote just one of them. On 11 December 2001, just after the election, the Chief Minister said:
One thing is certain: my government’s commitments will be delivered by accountable government that is conducted in the most open manner possible.
He continued:
As part of my government’s strong commitment to the principles of openness and accountability, we will ensure that key accountability laws, such as the Freedom of Information Act and the Administrative Appeals Act, give effect to those principles. Not only will we ensure that we have the right legislative framework; we will also ensure that those tasked with implementing and managing the legislation do so in a way which gives effect to its spirit.
This Chief Minister made undertakings that not only would they change the laws to make government open and accountable but also that they would legislate for the hearts and minds of the implementers to make them open and accountable.
Through the passage of the Human Rights Act, the ACT government was the first government in Australia to introduce a human rights act and to confer upon the citizens of the ACT, amongst other things, at sections 16 and 17, “the freedom to seek, receive and impart information of all kinds” and the right to “take part in the conduct of public affairs, directly or through freely chosen representatives”.
The principles of openness set down in the Human Rights Act and the capacity of freely chosen representatives to exercise that freedom on behalf of other citizens have been substantially, progressively and consistently stymied by this government in relation to the Towards 2020 closures.
First and foremost, we have audacious comments in relation to the Costello report, repeated as recently as last Friday by the Chief Minister on ABC radio. With the functional review, we have had a secret document, a document that this Chief Minister and this government are not prepared to put into the public domain. In relation to decisions made in the budget context, the underlying, underpinning impetus for those decisions, which seem to have been contained in the functional review, is not available for public scrutiny.
I would like to take us back to a previous government which undertook a similar functional review under the alliance government. The first major initiative of the alliance government was that the then Chief Minister instituted a review of finances, the state of finances and the operations of departments in the ACT. As a result of that, a number of substantial—and often unpopular—decisions were made and carried out.
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