Michelle Rowland (Greenway, Australian Labor Party, Attorney-General) Share this | Hansard source

With respect to amendment (3), the government opposes the amendment. The government considers that this provision is necessary to achieve efficiencies and allow agencies and ministers to more quickly resolve requests of this kind. The government recognises that a similar provision was repealed in the 2010 reforms and that the ALRC's 1997 open government report recommended the repeal.

However, the ALRC also acknowledged that repealing the provision may increase the cost of FOI processing. The government respectfully suggests that, in the context of rising FOI costs since the 2010 reforms, the repeal should be reconsidered on that basis.

The proposed provision has appropriate safeguards. The provision is only available in certain circumstances. The decision to refuse access is a reviewable decision through internal review and by the information commissioner and the Administrative Review Tribunal. When relying on the provision, the agency or minister provides a statement of reasons for the decision, including that the provision was used and what exemptions were relied on to refuse access.

With respect to amendment (4), the government considers the proposed changes to cabinet exemption are required to appropriately protect information central to the cabinet process and support the principle of collective ministerial responsibility.

The amendments are necessarily to more clearly and accurately reflect how the cabinet process works in practice, and to ensure appropriate protections for the full range of documents prepared to support the cabinet process and workings of cabinet government. The amendments would provide appropriate protections for briefings where a matter is presented to cabinet orally and without papers and reflect that, for example, a summary of a cabinet document can be just as revealing of cabinet deliberations as a verbatim copy or an extract.

The change of the reference from 'dominant purpose' to 'substantial purpose' recognises that documents may be created for multiple purposes; however, the cabinet purpose must be of substance, real and not insignificant, trivial or nominal, ensuring the exemption still applies to documents with a genuine cabinet purpose. The government will therefore be opposing both sets of amendments.

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