Page 1508 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 4 May 2016
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confidentiality is justified, but I think that as a default information should be public as often as possible. Transparency, scrutiny and involvement of the community are all very important in government processes.
I am quite happy to have a debate about transparency and about the release of government information. I am quite happy to debate the operations of the procurement system in the ACT. In fact, members will have the opportunity to debate some of these issues soon when I table legislation to significantly reform FOI laws in the territory. I have already released and consulted on a draft of this legislation. I expect that the debate on the FOI legislation will go to fundamental principles about confidentiality and about the public interest in government activities. I look forward to this debate and I look forward to Mr Coe’s contribution to that.
But this piece of legislation that Mr Coe has put before us today is essentially the opposite. It does not go to principles at all. It tries to use the ACT’s procurement legislation to politicise the capital metro project. It would be embarrassing for a legislature to pass such a law. Why does Mr Coe propose that if a project is about light rail a company cannot access commercial-in-confidence protocols but if the project is about, say, buses, which he has a new-found enthusiasm for, or recycling, it can? His proposals do not relate to procurement or confidentiality or transparency at all. This is just another medium for the Canberra Liberals to state their opposition to light rail.
Mr Coe refuses to acknowledge that the ACT’s light rail project has had the highest level of transparency. It does not suit his political interest to admit this. In order to aid his political campaign, he wants to paint the capital metro project as secretive and the government as hiding important information. Anyone with any degree of objectivity will know that this is absolutely not true. The government has been transparent to an unusual degree. The points that Mr Coe likes to raise in his critique of light rail—points about the business case, for example—are available to him only because of the high level of transparency that the government has allowed.
As I have said before, you will not find a similar project with this level of transparency. Other governments go to great lengths to keep information about such projects secret. Those other governments would probably say that the ACT has been transparent to a fault, because transparency allows the particularly mischievous critics access to more information that they can twist or misuse in a negative campaign. That certainly has been happening in the ACT.
I accept that outcome, because it is important to be transparent, to give the public as much information as possible and to let them use it to make their decisions. The government has to make its case and, hopefully, the public can see through the misinformation and misleading arguments that they are being subjected to by the Canberra Liberals.
To conclude on this particular proposal from Mr Coe, I will not be supporting it. I will happily debate procurement processes and transparency if there is a sensible and genuine proposal for reform. But I believe what Mr Coe is putting forward is quite a ridiculous proposition, suggesting that we should have one standard of contracting for
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