Page 2792 - Week 07 - Thursday, 7 June 2012
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should release publicly details of requests before that policy was publicly released by the proposer of the policy. The committee was of the view that a request to cost a possible policy should remain confidential to the proposer of that policy until such time as the proposer decided to release that policy.
The recommendations then go through the various clauses. For instance, we have recommended that clause 11 not be proceeded with. That is the clause that looked at charging a fee. We recommended that clause 9 be amended to make election commitments exempt from freedom of information legislation and, for clarity and certainty, that this material is not to be released at the direction of government or under any other process until after the government is formed. If you put something out, somebody could immediately FOI it and then get the material before the election was held.
There are some safeguards that we have put in. For instance, in recommendation 8 the committee recommends that the provisions on page 5 of the guidelines which read “this does not preclude the government of the day requesting factual material” be deleted because they should not be requesting material about what others have asked for. In recommendations 9 and 10 we have made it quite clear that, unless the minister is the actual requester of the costing, the minister must not request information from the Under Treasurer or any official public servant or officer about that costing. Recommendation 10 says that no public service officer should inform the Treasurer or any minister about what is in the detail, just to make sure that it is covered off both ways.
The committee also recommended that part 4 of the draft guidelines relating to the process following the release of costings be amended. Once it has been released, the costing starts. Part 4 allowed only three hours in which it would come from Treasury, go back and then be released. We recommend that that be at least 24 hours. There were examples in the election four years ago where the debate between members and Treasury officials lasted, in some cases, for some days. So three hours is certainly inadequate.
This is an interesting area. It is a report, of course, that is based on the draft bill. We would hope that the government would take on board these recommendations, particularly as the minister has sat in on all the hearings and the discussions, and as it is going forward as a unanimous report.
What will happen now is that the government will have to come back and table a bill. Because we have taken a little longer than we suspected we would, the next opportunity for tabling a bill will be in August. That will mean at some stage, I suspect, the suspension of standing orders if the government chooses to proceed. With that said, it is probably better if people read the report and look at the recommendations in detail and the context in which they are written.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (10.12): I will just add briefly to Mr Smyth’s comments. I think he has made a good summary of the committee process, and I thank him for that. The committee process itself was an interesting one. As Mr Smyth noted, this was the first time we have used this collaborative committee model. I think that it
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