HON DR STEVE THOMAS (South West) [10.10 am] — without notice: I move —
That this house —
(a) notes the promise of the Premier that his government would deliver a gold standard of transparency and accountability;
(b) notes the many occasions in which the McGowan government has failed to deliver on the Premier’s promise; and
(c) calls on the Premier to finally deliver on his promise by raising his government’s standards of transparency and accountability to a gold standard so that the Parliament and the community can be assured this administration is operating in an open, accountable and honest manner.
Comments and speeches from various members
HON ALISON XAMON (North Metropolitan) [10.51 am]: I rise to speak to this motion. It is a broad-ranging motion, so it is an opportunity for all of us to bring out our various grievances about this government’s lack of transparency. I want to take the opportunity to provide some of my thoughts about where we are at in terms of freedom of information requests and restate some of my concerns about the State Records Office of Western Australia. As we know, the Office of the Information Commissioner and the State Records Office were established to assist us to develop and maintain accountability and transparency in Western Australia. Importantly, both bodies came out of recommendations arising from WA Inc and the Royal Commission into Commercial Activities of Government and Other Matters. To refresh the memory of members, recommendation 1 of that report states —
Freedom of Information legislation be enacted in this State as a matter of priority.
Recommendations 2 to 4 discussed essential matters about how the FOI legislation needed to work. Recommendation 20(a) and (b) led to the development of the State Records Commission out of further work of the Commission on Government. For the FOI legislation to achieve its purpose, it is essential that as much information as possible is provided to applicants who are going through the FOI process. The record-keeping practices also need to be sufficient to enable FOI officers to ascertain what information they need to hand over. We need to know whether records have been made, whether those records still exist and where they might be found.
The most recent annual report of the Office of the Information Commissioner shows that the last year has seen a substantial 11.5 per cent increase, or an additional 2 000 applications, in the number of FOI applications made in Western Australia. I am really concerned that this may reflect people resorting to using FOI in an attempt to uncover information that really should be more easily accessible and readily available. That annual report disappointingly shows a reduction in the rate of applicants who received either full access to the documents that they originally attempted to access or access to edited copies of the documents that they sought. We have also seen an increase in the number of documents that either do not exist or cannot be found, and sometimes an outright refusal to allow access to those documents. For example, police outright refused access to nearly 40 per cent of FOI requests.
Among the issues that concern me about what is happening in the FOI space is the conflation of the documents that are deemed to not exist with documents that cannot be found. At the very least, these need to be articulated as two completely separate categories so that we can get a picture of what is happening with record keeping in this state. Reporting them together shows more lack of respect for the necessity for good record-keeping practices. As a starting point, the work of government needs to be open and transparent so that people do not have to resort to making FOI applications in the first place, simply to access much of the information that is held by our government agencies. The “Western Australian Whole of Government Open Data Policy” acknowledges that access to public sector data promotes more transparent and accountable government. Access to data also increases productivity and improves service delivery by supporting innovation, research and education, and by facilitating collaboration and evidence-based decision-making. That comes directly from the policy document. I acknowledge, of course, that some information held by government, particularly that relating to individuals, needs to be protected, and that an FOI regime is an essential transparency mechanism. It is deeply concerning that people are increasingly having to use that regime to access information, which I think can be easily argued should be made publicly available, and that even after they have gone through that FOI process, they are being denied access to that information. The annual reports are telling us that this is getting worse; it is not getting better.
I will recap some of the government’s decisions over the last few years. It has made the decision to utterly gut the State Records Office of staff, and I remind members that the State Records Office was established as a result of WA Inc. The government has completely ignored the State Records Commission’s warnings about the inadequacy of the funding made available to it to perform its legislative role, and it has instead buried the office into a supporting role within a department and removed any kind of specific budgeting and reporting for that office. We know that FOI and other transparency and accountability measures are not going to work if we do not have good and appropriate record management. To be very clear, the way we are dealing with FOI and state records at the moment definitely does not reflect gold standard transparency and accountability.
Comments and speeches from various members
Motion lapsed, pursuant to standing orders.