Page 1546 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 April 2011
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jurisprudence and therefore the decisions made in one jurisdiction can have more appropriate impact in the other. If the committee’s report were implemented, the ACT would see new FOI laws, as I said, that closely mirror the new commonwealth laws.
There would be wider publication of government information online and the full development of what has been called a push model for public sector information. It would improve openness and efficiency of the freedom of information process. It provides for the establishment of an ACT ombudsman, privacy commissioner and freedom of information commissioner rather than relying on the commonwealth to provide these services, as is currently the case, and provides for a significant overhaul of the processes for the release of documents. This will have the most impact on cabinet documents.
The recommendations would, if adopted, make a significant contribution to democratic rights and freedoms of the people of the ACT. And it is the clear view of the committee that the FOI Act needs to be brought up to date so that the residents of the ACT can enjoy the same freedoms as those in other innovative states in Australia.
The committee also believes that it is important that, because we are in the ACT and we are so closely associated with the commonwealth, we need to achieve consistency of arrangements. One of the areas of recommendation was in many ways touched on by the motion that Ms Le Couteur brought yesterday, that in this day and age information is more than ever the lifeblood of our government system and, where the public is properly informed, governments can be truly responsive to its needs. There is much in the discussion and the recommendations in this report that go to the substance of Ms Le Couteur’s motion yesterday about the timely publishing of information in the hands of the government so that in a sense, in the words of the Hawke report, FOI becomes a process of last resort for people seeking information.
I think that it is important to note that, while the committee was concluding its deliberations on this matter, the Hawke report Governing the city state was made public. It made a number of recommendations that touched on freedom of information and the operation of the Freedom of Information Act. Amongst other things, the Hawke report recommended that the government move to adopt a more proactive model of release of information held by the ACT public service, along the lines of the commonwealth scheme, and to support broader policy debate in the community, subject to appropriate and necessary restrictions, including in relation to executive privilege, security and personal privacy. In particular, Mr Hawke’s review recommends that the ACT government should develop an approach to proactively publish more of the information held by the ACT public service, including cabinet material, to establish a chief information officer in the proposed Chief Minister’s Department and that all FOI decisions made by the ACT public service be published on a central website.
It is true to say that there is an emerging consensus on the way that public information should be dealt with in Australia and that that emerging consensus shows that the legislation that we currently have, which dates back to 1984, is outmoded. While it was probably good at the time, it has not been substantially changed in the ACT and had not been substantially changed in the commonwealth until very recently. A lot has
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