Page 2049 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 May 2009
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agency heads that they must take a lead role in creating a culture of disclosure across agencies. Senator Faulkner makes it clear that causing embarrassment to the government is not a legitimate ground to withhold information. The legal affairs review of freedom on information is now underway. The government should be aware that it will soon be faced with a clear and stark choice—reform your secretive ways or get out of the way as the majority of the Assembly moves governance in the ACT into the 21st century.
People, including journalists and MLAs who should know better, have been saying that the Greens prevented this document from being released by blocking the Liberal Party’s original call for it to be released to this Assembly. This is, of course, nonsense. What would have happened is that the government would have refused to hand over the documents and the ACT community would have been up for hundreds of thousands dollars, and possibly a lot more, in legal fees as the government defended its decision through the Supreme Court and High Court. The public would have been in the invidious situation of paying for both the government and the Assembly’s legal representation. This is what the process of an independent arbiter is intended to prevent.
The Chief Minister’s obsession with secrecy is not shared in many other advanced democratic polities. This is a quote from the official New Zealand cabinet manual:
In line with the philosophy of the Official Information Act 1982, the law relating to public interest immunity as a means of protecting government documents has moved significantly in favour of disclosure. Cabinet documents do not occupy any specially privileged position.
The Welsh cabinet actually publish all their cabinet documents a fortnight or so after cabinet meets. The Swedes also have a strong communicative government transparency of government decision making. As I have already noted, even the most sensitive British cabinet documents do not enjoy a total immunity from release.
These issues were not presented to the independent arbiter and they were not raised or even acknowledged in the government’s submissions. So, on that basis, far from questioning Sir Laurence Street’s credibility, as the members of the government are suggesting, I am suggesting that the government’s submission did not give Sir Laurence Street the full picture that it might have given.
The law relating to the release of government information is evolving throughout the world, and progressive social forces like the Greens are at the forefront of the push to make governments accountable to the people. I am not convinced the doctrine of cabinet confidentiality, even in its most restrictive sense, serves the cause of democratic governance. Why should ministers be able to hide their actions from the public? Why should the electorate not have a right to know what their representatives actually argue for when they get behind cabinet’s doors? How can we accurately assess ministerial confidence if we do not know what they have supported or rejected in cabinet, and how can we know whether they truly represent our philosophies, values and policy positions if we do not know what they are arguing for in cabinet?
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