Page 3073 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 24 September 2014
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
I am hereby providing the Chief Minister, and all members of the place, with an opportunity to make those words a reality. I do not believe my bill, if enacted, would jeopardise commercial copyright or security concerns and we must not breach the privacy of individuals.
If the government is concerned that business or individuals will not like the name of their business or organisation to be published next to the amount they received, then they should not undertake work and invoice the government. If individuals or organisations are willing to take a payment of $10,000 or more from the government, they should be willing to have that payment disclosed and the government could simply tell people when work is requested that the payment will be disclosed.
I envisage that the government or some special interest group may say that the price one charges—that is, the invoice amount—is commercial-in-confidence. If this case is made, I utterly refute it. If organisations are going to take on work for the government and get paid with taxpayers’ funds, they must expect that that amount they are paid could become public knowledge.
I believe that this bill, if enacted, will be good for government too. It will help all decision-makers to think twice about signing up to spend taxpayers’ money on a project and to ensure that the territory is getting good value for money.
Finally, I do not expect that the provisions in this bill will be difficult to undertake. The ACT government already has a comprehensive system for administering the territory’s finances. The information I am requesting should be able to be generated through a report. For example, the government should be able to exercise a monthly query from the database for all invoices paid in excess of $10,000 with the requirements of the bill as fields of the query. That report could then be uploaded in PDF or Excel. Ideally, in the future, it would be a live and searchable database, but that is not mandated in the bill. In fact, in the future, the database could be linked to the contracts register so that individuals could see what payments have been made for each disclosed contract.
Members of the Legislative Assembly have the privilege of being able to submit questions on notice to ministers regarding the affairs of their responsibilities. I have asked hundreds of questions of ministers regarding expenditure and the delivery of programs. However, there are only 17 members here who have that privilege. I want the other 365,000 Canberrans to have access to more information too. In fact, on 15 November 2011, the Chief Minister said:
I committed the government to reforming a number of areas of government and administration to deliver greater transparency. This includes the adoption of a default position that information available to the government should be made available to the community, thereby enabling greater participation by Canberrans in the business of government.
My bill will ensure that the publication of more financial information becomes the default position. The Greens too, be they Mr Rattenbury or his predecessors, have also claimed to support disclosure of more government information. Given that, I hope the Greens will support my bill.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video