Page 650 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 11 February 2009
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“The Freedom of Information Act, requires for a full range of exemptions of material that won’t be provided pursuant to the Freedom of Information Act whether it’s commercially in confidence, relates to third parties, is an internal working document. Every time documents are released under the FOI Act the FOI officer goes through them and deletes and blacks out all the information which is exempt under the Act.”
What the Chief Minister is saying there to officials is this: “If there is an exemption, you should claim it. Claim every possible exemption you can.” There is no requirement for officials not to provide information. These are exemptions that should be applied in the spirit of the freedom of information law, which says that the community has a right to know. The Freedom of Information Act is about providing information to the public with limited exemptions rather than about trying to exempt as many documents as is possible. We saw the attitude of the Chief Minister in his own words on 2CC on 18 June 2008, saying that these are required exemptions.
These exemptions should be used in a reasonable way. We have seen that the conclusive certificates have not been used in a reasonable way, certainly by the minister for education in this city. In both the debacle that was the Tuggeranong power station issue and the debacle that was the handling of the school closures program, we have seen that this government will use whatever method it can to stop people from getting information.
In relation to the Tuggeranong power station, we found—when we were forced to go to the AAT, having had thousands of pages of documents suppressed—that, when we eventually agreed to terms in terms of getting access to some information in mediation in the AAT, we received something which had been amended after the agreement was made. We were trying to get to the bottom of a document, a deed of agreement, that went to the heart of the government’s involvement in this debacle. We wanted to know what they were trying to impose on ActewAGL in relation to this site. What we got was an altered document. We got absolutely no information as to where the government had been, because all we got was a document that was altered after it was agreed that it would be provided to us.
That is this government’s record on freedom of information. That is the way they have cynically used it for their own purposes. That is why we need some reform. This is the first step, the first important step. Conclusive certificates have been used as a “Get out of jail free” card by ministers in this government and no doubt by ministers in other governments. As an assembly, we are saying today that we are going to make that more difficult, that we are not going to provide them with as many opportunities to use this “Get out of jail free” card.
We hope that it will be the first step in some more and more extensive reforms to the Freedom of Information Act. It should be viewed in this way. There are circumstances where it is reasonable for governments not to release information. But that is a case they need to make. In the ordinary course, the principle behind freedom of information law—which has been with us for many years now, in all jurisdictions—is that this is the public’s information. There are some circumstances where it is inappropriate that things are put into the public domain, but they are limited. We
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