Page 1640 - Week 05 - Thursday, 5 May 2016
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The Freedom of Information Bill 2016 will not only assist Canberrans to assess whether the government has done its job; it will also assist governments in governing in the best interests of the community. The bill is intended to be a means for the community not just to judge us on the ideas that we put forward but to actually promote participation in the development of those ideas.
Marie Shroff, who was New Zealand cabinet secretary for 16 years and then became the New Zealand Privacy Commissioner, said of their journey to a now quite open FOI scheme:
Open government is now deeply ingrained. Normal policy development processes continue but most, and certainly the best, policy advisers now start thinking at any early stage how to consult interest groups and the public … Very few major policies now come as a surprise to the public as they will have been signalled well in advance through these various means. … Wherever possible conflicting views will be exposed, opponents on both sides brought together so that they understand each other’s point of view, and bureaucrats will diagnose and report on potentially unpleasant reactions to government policy.
Before turning to the details of the bill, there is one underlying issue in the FOI debate that needs to be considered and which has been the subject of public attention recently in Canberra: the impact public accessibility of government information has on the quality and candour of the advice provided by the public service.
When considering this issue it is important to consider two underlying principles. Firstly, we should have an apolitical public service and, secondly, every public servant has an obligation to act with integrity and to be accountable for her or his conduct. It is an affront to the values that we expect of the public service to argue that frank and fearless advice can only be provided where it is certain the advice will remain confidential.
Dr Allan Hawke, the former secretary of the Department of Defence in his report on the operation of the commonwealth FOI act, said:
Officials should be happy to publicly defend any advice given to a minister and if they are not happy to do so then they should rethink the advice.
Public servants who provide good advice that they are confident in having nothing to fear from the public analysis of that advice and neither does the government. In truth, public servants simply should not be put in the position of having to consider whether the advice may be made public. Their job is to focus on the merits of the advice itself. The rest is simply out of their hands. I am confident that public servants who are instructed to simply give the best advice they can, irrespective of whether the information could become public, would be professional enough to do so. To imply otherwise I think is disrespectful to them.
I turn to an overview of the bill. The bill repeals the existing Freedom of Information Act 1989, which was modelled on the original commonwealth Freedom of Information Act 1982, and creates a new modern FOI scheme based on the Queensland Right to Information Act 2009.
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