Page 1756 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 21 August 2007
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I also incorporate it in Hansard.
The incorporated document appears at attachment 1 on page 1808.
In addition to this, the most important thing that we can do is to do the job that the Stanhope government said that it would do and reform freedom of information through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. This morning, my leader, Mr Stefaniak, announced our legislative program, which includes means to fix the Freedom of Information Act by doing away with some of the more inappropriate conclusive certificates and by making the Administrative Appeals Tribunal a place where government agencies do not resist. (Time expired.)
MR BARR (Molonglo—Minister for Education and Training, Minister for Planning, Minister for Tourism, Sport and Recreation, Minister for Industrial Relations) (4.33): I thank Mrs Dunne for raising this issue; it gives me the opportunity to respond to some of the more outrageous claims in the speech that she has just given.
It is worth noting that Mrs Dunne has put in numerous FOI requests and has received some 10,000 folios of information from the Department of Education and Training, equating to over 13,000 pages of information. I am sure that Mrs Dunne has read each one of those 13,000 pages closely. My guess is that servicing Mrs Dunne’s FOI requests have involved thousands of hours of staff time—time taken away from our public education system. I note, though, that the government has not imposed any of the normal administrative charges for processing Mrs Dunne’s FOI requests. That is an indication that we are committed to open and accountable government. The Department of Education and Training will continue to service Mrs Dunne’s FOI requests in a professional manner.
Of course, we recognise that we have a responsibility to be open and accountable with the community. Mrs Dunne raised examples in relation to the 2020 process. I cannot think of any public consultation process in the history of self-government in the ACT that involved the attendance by a minister and departmental officials at more public meetings than that—over 700 meetings in a six-month period. The process involved responding to more than 1,600 pieces of correspondence. There were 350 written submissions as part of the consultation process. It was extensive.
Mrs Dunne will make all sorts of accusations about aspects of the process, but I was very clear from the start about the criteria that I would use to make decisions under the Education Act; I was very clear about the issues that the education system was facing. No-one—not even Mrs Dunne, because I note she has said it in this place on a number of occasions—would accuse me of not fronting up to each and every one of those communities on numerous occasions to answer questions and to respond in detail to the issues, right down to giving individual dollar amounts within categories within school budgets, broken down into eight or nine different subcategories dealing with the financial implications of each and every proposal that the government put forward. We were quite up front about what we were seeking to do: to redistribute money within the education system to improve the quality of our public education system.
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