Page 2859 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 29 June 2011
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opposition would continue to pursue this matter. And today, over two years later, those predictions I made are being proved true.
In the Assembly last week I made a statement about open government and the open government initiatives that are underway. It is important to understand that both open government and justly exercised executive privilege, and indeed parliamentary privilege, are necessary for good governance. Open government initiatives rest on three principles: transparency in process and information, participation by citizens in the governing process and public collaboration in finding solutions to problems and participation in the improved wellbeing of the community.
As I have stated both in reply to the ministerial statement and in comments I have made in this place since, I strongly believe that, as a first principle, information available to the government should be made available for use by the community. However, there are of course some deliberations of cabinet that do need to be privileged to allow government to do its job and to do its job properly. Similarly, deliberations of the parliament, of members of this place, are also subject to privilege.
Executive privilege is not something this government has dreamt up for its own convenience. Executive privilege is a principle applied across all governments in Australia. It provides for the appropriate quarantining of the discussions and decisions of cabinet. It allows debate on the most difficult and contentious issues to occur in the cabinet room without being constrained and in the knowledge that these considerations and discussions will not become public in the short term. It enables the executive to carry out its decision making freely and confidentially.
The government are elected to make decisions in consultation with the community. All of the major decisions flowing from the functional review that were considered and that would have a major impact on our community were progressed in consultation with our community.
The status of executive privilege is in keeping with the privileges that attach to our work in the Assembly. Privilege also applies to what goes on in this chamber so that we are able to do our jobs properly for the benefit of the people of Canberra. In a similar vein, privilege legitimately attaches to the deliberations of the cabinet.
This Assembly has explicitly recognised the Latimer House principles and adopted them as part of our standing orders. Those principles address exactly the issues being talked about today. Each commonwealth country’s parliaments, executives and judiciaries are the guarantors in their respective spheres of the rule of law, the promotion and protection of fundamental human rights and the entrenchment of good governance based on the highest standards of honesty, probity and accountability. In their respective spheres, the parliament has a proper role to play in our system of government, as do the executive and the judiciary. But both those proper roles have boundaries, and those boundaries protect the capacity of each arm of the government to discharge its part.
In the case of the functional review, this is a piece of work that was commissioned for the cabinet and went to the heart of some of the most difficult decisions that cabinet
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