Solomon FOI review is a step towards open government
Solomon FOI review is a step towards open government
June 17, 2008 12:00am
IT'S probably the most important document released on Queensland governance since Tony Fitzgerald, QC, delivered his report into official corruption in 1989.
It is a report that may well become a blueprint for others, including the Federal Government, and make Queensland a national leader in public accountability.
Yet, sadly, many don't even know it exists.
I'm, of course, referring to the Freedom of Information review delivered to Premier Anna Bligh last week by Dr David Solomon.
Entitled The Right to Information, the 423-page report offers 141 recommendations for reform that are as bold as they are overdue.
It's hard to believe that Queensland until the late 1980s was a political laughing stock interstate.
Rigged electoral boundaries, a murky public service culture and no parliamentary or ministerial accountability made governments in Queensland – first Labor to the late 1950s and then the Coalition and later the Nationals alone until 1989 – virtual empires, with premiers uncrowned kings.
But with the adoption of the Fitzgerald report – itself a masterpiece blueprint of electoral, administrative and judicial reform – Queensland became a paragon of political virtue.
As we boasted an independent Criminal Justice Commission (now CMC), an independent Electoral Commission and real reform to Cabinet, parliamentary and public service processes, no one dared laugh again.
Other states looked to us as a role model for all sorts of accountability measures, including our then state-of-the-art FOI legislation.
The then Goss Labor government was justly proud. Government members in the early 1990s trumpeted that FOI laws would be a triumph of law over political expediency, providing a gateway to information for the ordinary citizen and for interest groups and the media.
But FOI practices have sunk into grey waters since. It's become de rigueur, for example, for ministers to attach tomes of politically sensitive documents often unrelated to deliberations at hand to Cabinet papers so as to invoke the 30-year secrecy rule.
It's therefore a breakthrough that Solomon recommends reducing this waiting period before public disclosure to just 10 years.
Given a decade, or three parliaments, approximates the average political career, this should be ample time for closeted skeletons to be dusted without fear or favour.
But other tactics to help hide, or obscure, information – or at least to make its retrieval difficult – also have crept in.
Governments everywhere today regard the media as the enemy, with paranoia of journalistic fishing expeditions prevailing in ministerial offices.
We are, then, a long way from the spirit of open government so admirably laid down in the original 1992 FOI legislation.
Today, the default administrative position has moved from one where all information is free, with exceptions, to one where all information is off-limits, with exemptions granted at the Government's pleasure.
Solomon and his co-panelists Simone Webbe and Dominic McGann are therefore right to spell out in their second and third recommendations a single overarching theme: the need to move FOI from the existing pull model to a push model where government routinely and proactively releases government information without the need to make an FOI request.
It's a sentiment reflected in recommendation 138 which urges a new law called the Right to Information Act.
Bligh has invested significant leadership credibility in reforming FOI.
The fact she announced the review just days into her premiership demonstrates she's at pains to distinguish her Government from Peter Beattie's neglect of FOI.
All eyes are now on the Premier to see exactly how many of, and to what extent, the panel's recommendations are picked up.
If Bligh adopts the report in former premier Mike Ahern's words – lock, stock and barrel – she runs the risk of alienating politically fearful ministerial colleagues still wavering in their judgment of Bligh.
Yet if she squibs this reform opportunity for political expedience, she runs a risk of backlash from a jaded electorate cynically sick of governments doing whatever it takes to retain office.
Solomon's tough and honest appraisal is important as a reminder that every government needs watching.
Dr Paul Williams is a lecturer at the School of Arts, Griffith University, Gold Coast.
http://www.news.com.au/couriermail/story/0,23739,23871477-27197,00.html
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