Ms O’CONNOR (Hobart) – Mr President, I want to thank the member for Nelson for bringing this matter back to the Council. It is a very concerning matter when the Council resolves something by way of motion – and we have here what Council resolved, that it asked the government to ensure there is a process for the disclosure of ministerial diaries that is informed by best practice, is mandatory and there be a public consultation process to develop that mandatory ministerial diary disclosure scheme.
This Council was very clear about its will and unfortunately executive government sometimes allows itself to forget that it is there at the will of the parliament. In a Westminster system, the parliament is always the boss. To have a government that is notoriously secretive and has a decade-long track record of being so – and it sees the resolution of the Council and decides to implement something – pardon my language Mr President – that is completely half-arsed, arrogant and dismissive, is something that the Council should be concerned about.
Today we have an opportunity to reassert the will of the Council in order to deliver greater transparency, accountability and openness about the conduct of ministers of the Crown and how they spend their time. Ministers in this place will know that when you have the great honour bestowed on you of being a minister of the Crown, the Letters Patent say that you are;
…trusty and well beloved…
That is a very powerful set of words and it places on a minister a serious set of obligations, responsibilities and public expectations. To be truly trusty and well-beloved as minister, you should not seek to hide or have agencies or a policy of government hide your activities as minister.
This reminded me when I was reading the member’s motion of an incident. Everyone here will remember when Basslink failed in December of 2015. It was catastrophic for the state. It cut us off from the mainland. We had to fire up the Tamar Valley Power Station. The government was importing gas and diesel at the time. We sought to understand subsequent to that why the government’s response to that crisis was so sluggish. The minister at the time for energy was Mr Groom and we sought to get a copy of the minister’s diary for that period after Basslink went down and it is quite Orwellian. At risk of flashing a prop around the place, there is no other way I can demonstrate to members how contemptuous the government was at the time to our right-to-information request other than to show a bodgied-up ministerial diary that took us some three months after the RTI request came in to come back to us. It made it very clear that Mr Groom had gone on holiday with his family after Basslink broke. No one begrudges our colleagues a break. Ministers do work very hard, but there are circumstances where you might just put your holiday plans on hold. In January of 2013, every member of this place will remember the devastating Dunalley bushfires. When that happened the then premier, Lara Giddings, cut short her holiday in the UK and came straight back to Tasmania. My partner and I had booked a holiday which we immediately cancelled as cabinet ministers, because we and the premier at that time recognised that in times of crisis you are back here serving your community.
Apparently, a different set of standards was applied when Basslink broke. We had things in this bodgied‑up diary which were deliberately intended to conceal the minister’s activities. It goes back to some of the categories in the current discretionary disclosure framework. We have things here like ‘internal meeting media’, ‘internal meeting’, ‘travel’, ‘media’, ‘internal meeting ministerial duties’. Well, you would hope so, wouldn’t you?
We have here ‘business meeting’. With whom? What we now know, as a result of our right to information activities back then, is it took the then minister for Energy more than three weeks to sit down with the major industrials who were massively impacted by the failure of Basslink. Maybe, that was the business meeting that was not detailed in the diary at the time. It was very clear to us the attempt to stymie, stall, reframe our right-to-information request made in the public interest for the minister’s diary was a deliberate effort to conceal what the minister’s activities were at that time of crisis. Not good enough. I would argue not acting in a trusting and well‑beloved way.
The Council has made its will very clear here. This should not be contentious. At some level, government has recognised there is a community expectation that there be transparency around ministers’ diaries. What we have in part in response, I gather, to the Council’s resolution is an inadequate discretionary regimen, which is at the discretion of a government notorious for not being open and transparent.
I will be supporting this motion and encourage all members to do the same. I will end with this: good governments have nothing to hide. Good, hard‑working ministers have nothing to hide. I would argue if there was a more routine and open disclosure of ministerial diaries, there could be a greater public understanding of how hard ministers of the Crown work. Well, most of them, anyway. I will be glad to support this motion before the House.
