Dr WOODRUFF (Franklin – Leader of the Greens) – Honourable Speaker, a vote will be required. I move –
That the House –
(1) Notes:
(a) that government policy requires State Service Agencies to keep a Right to Information Disclosure Log and to publish assessed disclosures on this log if the information may be of interest to the public; and
(b) this policy does not apply to Government Business Enterprises (GBEs) or State Owned Companies (SOCs).
(2) Recognises that while some GBEs and SOCs keep a disclosure log anyway, many do not, meaning that much information of considerable public interest is only disclosed to the applicant, and not the public.
(3) Calls on the Government to require GBEs and SOCs to keep a Right to Information Disclosure Log on the same terms as State Service Agencies.
The government’s operation of the right to information system has many flaws, and they have been much discussed in the parliament over the last couple of weeks. In the repair of these flaws, some of them require major reforms and others rest on a cultural change within government which is firmly the responsibility of the Premier to oversee and guide, and through him, his ministers and ministerial staff.
Some of the flaws just need a bit of common sense to fix them and can, and should, be resolved almost immediately. The Greens’ motion today calls on the government to act on one of these, a straightforward change that’s long overdue. Our motion simply calls for all government business enterprises (GBEs) and state owned companies (SOCs) to do what state departments already do. That is to maintain disclosure logs for RTIs and to use those logs to publish their RTI decisions on the same terms as state service agencies already do.
To spell it out for people who don’t understand what I’m talking about, a disclosure log is a public register on a government agency’s website that lists information that’s been released in response to RTI requests. It improves public access to information, and it makes sure that information that’s released to one person is available to everybody. That is how we promote accountability of government and increase transparency, and through that, faith in the community that the government is doing the job they say that they’re doing.
There are some GBEs that already do have and use a disclosure log – for example, Hydro Tasmania. Hydro hasn’t always been forthcoming about releasing information under RTI and I well remember an extremely lengthy RTI process that my office went through a number of years ago now to uncover the extent of Hydro’s involvement in a problematic and risky project in Uganda. The fact that they do maintain a disclosure log when they don’t have to is a good thing.
Unfortunately, many other GBEs don’t do that. That’s a problem. When information is released under RTI laws, it should be available to the whole Tasmanian public, not just to the person or entity who made the application for the information in the first place.
We saw a really good example of the current problem with GBEs not actively disclosing RTI information in the last sitting week of parliament. The ABC published a story about an RTI that they’d made to Tasracing, and it was a great story and covered important matters of accountability. While we were in parliament debating this issue, the very right to information documents that had been released to the ABC were not available for us to examine. I understand from a contribution that the Leader of the Opposition made last sitting that Labor asked Tasracing for those documents and was denied them twice. That, manifestly, doesn’t pass the pub test in the community and it’s extremely poor practice and completely unjustifiable. It goes without saying that we think most Tasmanians expect that the information that the ABC requested should, first of all, have simply been handed over in the first place and there should never have been a right to information process that they had to go through, and secondly, when Labor asked for information that had already been released under Right to Information, it should just have been provided and furthermore, Labor should never have had to ask for the information at all. So rather than those documents being released to the applicant and then published on a disclosure log for everyone to see, this parliament was forced to order the release of those documents. That’s completely absurd.
To try to stop it happening again, the Greens’ integrity spokesperson, Cassy O’Connor, last week publicly called on the government to require their GBEs to publish right to information through disclosure logs so that they would accord with what is already standard practice with other government agencies.
We’re bringing this matter on for debate in the House today because we believe it’s very important for the parliament to express its view on the matter. It is fair to say this Liberal government has a very bad record on right to information and transparency more generally, but we’re hoping that, given the recent events and particularly given this excellent work by professors Rick Snell and Tim McCormack, they’ll be able to see the common sense and straightforward issue that this matter is trying to fix and we hope we can achieve support across the Chamber for this today.
That would be a very good thing because we’d have the government on record making a concrete commitment in this area, which would be positive. I really hope that there’s no foot dragging on this issue because I’ll just restate again: some GBEs do this, some of them don’t. It just doesn’t make sense. I believe there was a policy about consistency between agencies and Rick Snell and Tim McCormack made a number of comments around disclosure recommendations in their report. Recommendations 1 to 9 are all about the State Service generally and the Tasmanian government improving disclosure logs.
There are many small and important changes that would be made in that regard that we hope the government gets on with alacrity and deals with. None of them that I’ve seen there would require an expense of money, essentially. It’s really about the application more consistently and with alacrity putting information up on websites so that when an RTI is released it is within a very short amount of time. Some agencies are excellent at this and immediately put it up on their website while other agencies drag their heels, and some GBEs don’t do it at all.
Government businesses shouldn’t need to be reminded but some of them do need to be reminded that they’re owned and funded by Tasmanians. They serve the Tasmanian people. We hope the government will make sure that no more of parliament’s time is wasted making sure that a GBE provides basic matters of transparency that have been given to an applicant to everybody in the Tasmanian community and so that we don’t have to go through the charade that we did last week.
The right to information process is a resource that’s undertaken and enabled by the Right to Information Act, and it is an administrative process that sometimes uses a fair amount of staff time to provide information. Once that has been determined it’s appropriate to be released, that really should not just go to the person who’s made the application but be there for everybody else in the community. It’s not a small point for some people; it costs to make an application under Right to Information, and there are many times where other community groups or individuals simply want to know the information but feel they can’t step over the hurdle to put the application in and the administrative processes and pay the money in order to get the information. We’re asking for consistency: once something is done once it should be available for everybody to view. I really hope we’ll have the support from members for this small but important improvement to our right to information process.
