Kate Chaney (Curtin, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to support the member for Mackellar's amendment. FOI is a fundamental tool of accountability in our democracy and the default option should be disclosure. Adding more factors that count against disclosure is heading in the wrong direction to where the whole framework should be heading. FOI was developed in 1982 with a clear purpose to open up government, to shift that default from secrecy to transparency and to ensure that decisions made in the name of the public are actually visible to the public. It has generally worked. It ensures that the public find out what the government is doing, it exposes corruption and waste, and it allows the public to participate in government decision-making and exercise some power as citizens. Adding more exemptions to what can be disclosed is not in the spirit of the legislation as it was originally intended. It might be painful for government to actually have to be transparent in its decision-making, and I recognise that, but it is a small amount of pain to bear for a system of democracy that actually retains the trust of the people.

This part of the bill that the member for Mackellar is seeking to amend was going to introduce new factors to be considered that would say 'let's keep this secret'. But let's think about the concept of balance and whether balance is an appropriate thing to be looking for in this bill. We are balancing transparency for the benefit of the public versus a bit of inconvenience for public servants. One of the things put forward by the government in explaining the need for this bill is that there are 500 full-time equivalent public servants filling FOI requests. That sounds like a lot, 500 people. But is this really too many? If we are thinking about balance, do we have that balance? There are 213,000 federal public servants and 500 of them are focused on making sure that government decisions are transparent—that is, 0.2 per cent of the public service focused on public accountability.

I think that this concept of introducing factors that count against a greater disclosure is completely the wrong way for the legislation to be headed in, and I thank the member for Mackellar for her amendment.

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