HON ALISON XAMON (North Metropolitan) [10.11 pm]: I rise tonight because I want to make some comments about the State Records Office of Western Australia. The last time I rose to talk about the State Records Office I noted that it has been inadequately resourced pretty much for the entire time of its existence. The other thing is that there are more than six million government documents held by government agencies either on hand or in third party storage. When I asked questions about this, I was alarmed that the minister responsible was not able to advise the Parliament where all those documents are or even the storage costs for maintaining those documents. Given the lack of conservation services, we may not be able to restore many of the records currently stored if they come back to us damaged in any way. There are also some emerging concerns, quite serious concerns, that we may be already losing all of our digital records. A very concerning large number of government agencies are not sure that they will be able to access their own digital records in the future, because we are changing digital platforms so quickly, let alone be able to transfer them to an appropriate archive to be kept on a permanent basis.
The reason I keep banging on about this is that good records management is a key anticorruption measure and this was particularly highlighted as a result of the WA Inc royal commission. Once again, I am turning members’ attention to the issue of state records because this has come up again, particularly in light of the special inquiry into government programs and projects headed by John Langoulant. The Langoulant report uncovered records management issues that were, frankly, quite shocking. I think it is appalling that after the disaster of WA Inc, all these years later we are still getting the basics of good records management so badly wrong. We are clearly not learning from our mistakes. I recognise that there were certainly project management issues, as was extensively documented in the report, but, in addition to that, a large number of records and data management issues were identified, and we should be paying attention to this. As the WA Inc commissioners reported, good record keeping and transparency are essential to ensuring that we can maintain the public’s trust in the government and in government decision-making. The Langoulant review also called out transparency measures as an essential means of maintaining public trust.
We know that when records cannot be produced, including business cases, apparently, we cannot know whether it is poor record keeping or poor project management. This is something we should all be particularly concerned about. A lack of records reduces public trust that good governance is taking place. In a state like Western Australia that has such a chequered history, it is essential that we do all we can to ensure that we do not go down this path.
The need to improve records and data management practices across government has been recognised as being important enough to make it into the executive summary of the Langoulant report. This is exactly what the State Records Commission and the State Records Office were established to do. The State Records Commission exists to, amongst other things, monitor the operation of compliance with the State Records Act; monitor compliance by government organisations with their respective record-keeping plans; inquire into any breaches or possible breaches of the State Records Act; and establish principles and standards for the governance of record keeping by state organisations.
Additionally, on page 81 of report 1, there is a whole-of-government recommendation that the records management and data management practices of the public sector need to be scrutinised more regularly by the Auditor General. Although I do not disagree with this recommendation in principle, I note that the State Records Commission, of which the Auditor General is already a member and occasionally chairs, is the body that should be first in line to undertake that work. The State Records Office is the mechanism by which the commission should be able to achieve these purposes. We have detailed many times that resourcing for the State Records Office is inadequate. Commissioners have said in multiple annual reports that they simply do not have the resources to implement compliance monitoring and to meet government agency requests for records management training. That should be something that concerns all of us. I am also concerned that we do not foist yet more work on the Auditor General, because we already have an independent statutory body whose specialist purpose is exactly this— records and data management. Instead, we really need to look at funding it to be able to do this important job.
The report also called out the lack of adequate minute taking at board level and in ministerial briefings. Again, I note that the State Records Office is already well placed to establish those standards and to provide the necessary training, yet it continues to be too under-resourced to be able to do this work adequately.
We know that, with the machinery-of-government changes, it is intended that we are going to lose thousands of non-frontline staff. That will inevitably mean that many of the back-end functions, such as adequate record keeping and records management, are going to be de-prioritised and likely pushed onto frontline staff to manage, in addition to their existing duties. We know that the State Records Office has lost two staff members, and it already had only a tiny number of people working there as a result of voluntary redundancies. We also know that the Langoulant report and commonsense show that a lack of capacity in this area is proving to be a major problem for the state government.
Every inquiry into how things have gone wrong for the government turns up, like clockwork, poor records management. We do not need to be told every five to 10 years that records management is something that we desperately need to improve. We keep hearing this over and again when it goes pear-shaped, yet we never seem to do anything about it. We really need to ensure that the State Records Office and the State Records Commission are adequately resourced to do their jobs. The fact that we have such poor performance in records management in Western Australia will have to be addressed at some point. We have people who are best placed to be able to do it, but we need to ensure that they are receiving the resources to be able to do it. It is a fundamental tenet of the integrity of government that we start getting our records in order and start dealing with the backlog that needs to be addressed. I hope that we can start addressing this, and I will keep bringing it up.