Page 2803 - Week 08 - Thursday, 11 August 2016
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time. Again, having a blanket removal of this is not in the public interest. This information should be considered in a way that weighs it up on its merits rather than addresses it in a single and uniform manner.
Amendment agreed to.
MADAM DEPUTY SPEAKER: The question now is that the bill, as a whole, as amended, be agreed to.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (5.03): I will speak briefly in support of this bill as amended. We have come a long way in a fairly short time today in installing what will be fine new architecture for open government in the ACT. I congratulate Mr Rattenbury on persisting in this matter. Although we do not agree on everything, I think that we have come to a reasonable accommodation today. I thank the attorney and his staff. Although they agreed with even less than we did, the overall accommodation has been a good one. I commend the staff in the Leader of the Opposition’s office and also the staff in Mr Rattenbury’s and Mr Corbell’s offices for the work that they have done. I am sure the officials from the Justice and Community Safety Directorate and, in particular, the Parliamentary Counsel’s Office have been beavering away on this.
I also pay tribute to Janice Rafferty, whose assistance has meant that we have managed to pass this legislation and go through quite a complex detail stage in a fairly orderly fashion; and also to whoever it was in either the attorney’s office or JACS who came up with the system of clustering the amendments by type, rather than just dealing with them by number. However, I apologise to Assembly staff. I suspect the reading of this bill will be very difficult indeed. Max probably draws the short straw on that one.
That said, this is a piece of legislation that we can be proud of. It is not perfect, and it has been a little bit sausage-like, but it is a vast improvement on the regime that we have had hitherto. It feels, at the end of an Assembly, that it is an appropriate time to do this, and I reflect on Mr Hanson’s remarks earlier this morning: a time of election uncertainty concentrates the mind on these issues more than at other times. I made my first attempt to amend the Freedom of Information Act in about 2006. It is a great achievement for this Assembly to make the progress that we have made on this bill.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (5.06): I rise briefly to reflect on some of the remarks Mrs Dunne just made in thanking the various staff involved. Be it our various officers in the public service, in the Parliamentary Counsel’s Office and here in the Assembly, it has taken a lot of work from a lot of people. I would particularly like to acknowledge Tom Warne-Smith and Indra Esguerra in my office. They have both worked extremely hard on this. Once we got down and got really focused on this, the three parties worked together quite effectively. Even if we have not agreed on everything, we have been able to have quite productive and involved conversations. I think that has resulted in a good outcome.
That outcome is that the ACT now has much better freedom of information legislation. It requires the proactive release of information from government and removes a
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