Page 1755 - Week 05 - Thursday, 2 April 2009

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(a) relevant existing and proposed Commonwealth, State and Territory laws and practices;

(b) other recent reviews of freedom of information legislation, nationally and internationally;

(d) specific issues relating to access by individuals to personal information, including the interaction between freedom of information laws and the protection of privacy interests; and

(e) the interaction of the FOI Act with other mechanisms for accessing information held by government.

(4) Any other relevant matter.

These terms of reference and this course of action were foreshadowed when we debated both the Canberra Liberals’ and the government’s amendments to the Freedom of Information Act a couple of sitting weeks ago and these terms of reference have been on the notice paper essentially since then for consultation and for people to make comments on them.

I will be perfectly frank. The terms of reference are not necessarily an original piece of work and draw fairly substantially on the Queensland government’s terms of reference in their review of the Freedom of Information Act. They were comprehensive and they produced quite a good and thorough report so that I thought, rather than reinvent the wheel, we should model ourselves on a tried and true model.

Since the Solomon inquiry in Queensland, there have been substantial other developments at the federal level and I note that the attorney has circulated amendments which draw more fully on the Solomon inquiry terms of reference than I had done. I tried to keep them streamlined but the attorney proposes to add a substantial amount to the terms of reference by his amendments. While I do not think they necessarily add a great deal, they certainly do not detract and the Canberra Liberals will be happy to incorporate his amendments into our proposal for reference to the justice and community safety committee. It makes the terms of reference quite long and a bit daunting in their volume.

I actually draw attention to proposed new paragraph (3)(h) which I think is of particular utility. It refers to:

law and practice in other jurisdictions where government held information including cabinet documents are more readily available.

That is actually a very useful contribution to the discussion because I think, when the Freedom of Information Act was first enacted federally in 1984 and here in 1989, there was a different regime and a different approach in place in relation to access to documents. After nearly 30 years of practice in freedom of information in Australia,

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