Page 2039 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 4 June 2019
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Detail stage
Clauses 1 to 11, by leave, taken together and agreed to.
Clauses 12 to 17, by leave, taken together.
MRS KIKKERT (Ginninderra) (11.43): I will be opposing these clauses. As Mr Hanson already noted, the Canberra Liberals will not be supporting part 5 of the amendment bill. Our specific concern lies with clause 17, which, as those opposite will know, has attracted a good bit of expert attention and public discussion over the past few weeks, including a recent request by Chris Donohue, President of the Law Society of the Australian Capital Territory, that this clause be removed from the bill.
In addressing this matter, I want to be very clear: we understand the justifications this government has given for proposing this amendment. We realise that, to the Attorney-General, this is merely a technical amendment designed to harmonise the Freedom of Information Act with the privacy provisions already present in the Children and Young People Act. We get that.
Section 844(2) of the Children and Young People Act already states that protected information includes sensitive information. Mr Ramsay and his staff have repeatedly assured us that this amendment does not alter existing rights, because sensitive information is not currently available through FOI applications and has not been released to anyone under the existing FOI Act.
That merely raises a rather important question: if sensitive information is already a subset of protected information and if section 848(2) of the Children and Young People Act already prohibits the divulging of sensitive information including, according to section 849, even if the person whose information it is gives consent, then why bother amending the FOI Act to make these restrictions even more obvious?
If doing so changes absolutely nothing on a practical level, as I have been repeatedly told, why bother updating the act? Is it to tighten up further the restrictions on accessing information? Is it to put a deadlock on a door that people might have thought was open before? Is it to provide more secrecy? These are the questions that people are asking.
What happens in this place does not happen in a vacuum. It is therefore important to point out that there are very real reasons why this supposedly harmless amendment has drawn the attention of and comments from senior legal practitioners, including the president of the Law Society and the head of Legal Aid ACT’s family law practice. These people, after all, are quite capable of reading the relevant acts, the proposed amendment and the government’s explanation for why it wants to make this change.
In recent months many of these same legal experts have openly been calling for greater transparency in the territory’s care and protection system. In this, they have been joined by child welfare advocates, by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community leaders and, very recently, by all four members of the ACT’s Human
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