Page 2114 - Week 06 - Thursday, 26 June 2008
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Just one example which I hope this accountability initiative will tackle is the provision of training for freedom of information officers in their assessment of the public interest under the Freedom of Information Act provisions that require a decision maker to make a public interest assessment. In none, not one, of the decision letters the opposition received was a single argument made out as to why the public interest in withholding documents under section 36 outweighed the default imperative in the act to release documents. What is really disturbing is that in this case it seems as if FOI officers were self-censoring to avoid criticism for releasing information that might politically damage their executive or ministers.
On those same FOI decision letters: there is the exact same wording from various decision makers on both major exemption categories claimed. This was a circumstance where there was intense political interest in the decision and when all agency executives would be acutely aware that, if their department was the one which released documents that embarrassed the government, then their popularity would be likely to suffer, to put it mildly.
Last year, the Labor Attorney-General cited with approval the infamous High Court judgement in McKinnon, when he introduced yet another conclusive certificate clause. McKinnon was a case in which the Chief Justice himself, among others, dissented and condemned the reasoning in the judgement for destroying the principle of a public interest test and making a mockery of an applicant’s right to information free of politically motivated interference.
It makes a mockery of accountability and, while these clauses remain on our statute book, whoever is in government cannot credibly claim that they have a commitment to accountability—three government agencies and not one argument in favour of the public interest in knowing the truth, not even when the decision involves sections of the Freedom of Information Act where the decision not to release documents must only be made when the arguments for and against releasing the documents result in a decision that the public interest in exempting outweighs the public interest in releasing the documents.
There are also the requirements of a small jurisdiction with numerous complex responsibilities. The lines of policy and implementation can and have been blurred at times. Officers of the ACT public service need a particularly sophisticated understanding of the proper demarcation between their responsibilities and those of their ministers. I do not believe that is always the case. How the public service deals with the intimate connections among government agencies, service providers, community pressure groups, business organisations, even political parties is also worthy of closer scrutiny. There are clearly both advantages and disadvantages in living and working in such a small pond. I would hope that the public service improvement projects would look carefully at these matters.
Another issue in relation to this is that the Public Service Commissioner, as a position, has been quite considerably downsized from someone who had that role alone to someone who now tries to fit it in amongst all her other executive duties as—
Mr Mulcahy: She probably had to do dog catching as well.
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