Peter Timmins theguardian.com, Wednesday 9 October 2013
'Restoring FOI coverage should be high on the list of priorities'. Photograph: Graham Turner/Guardian
The brouhaha of recent days about parliamentarians' expenses has come to pass because information about payments made by the department of finance are published online. The latest batch is for the six month period to December 2012, so they are not made available nowhere near real time. But other payments made to or on behalf of parliamentarians by the parliament itself are not published. Nor are payments for hospitality, or similar services provided to ministers by the departments they administer.
In June this year, a week before the end of the Gillard government, the Parliamentary Service Amendment (Freedom of Information) Bill sailed through. Regarded as uncontentious because the major parties agreed on it, it exempts the Department of Parliamentary Services, the Department of the House of Representatives and the Department of the Senate entirely from the Freedom of Information Act.
Speakers for the major parties sang, albeit briefly and repetitively, from the same song sheet: legislation was necessary, presumably urgently, to restore a longstanding and previously understood position that the departments were not covered by the FOI act. The discovery by the Australian information commissioner that they were covered by the act had caused problems for the parliamentary librarian, and the issue needed to be settled beyond doubt; the move should be seen as an interim measure only.
Independent senator Nick Xenophon and the Democratic Labor Party senator John Madigan registered the only votes in support of a series of amendments proposed by Greens senator Lee Rhiannon to try to salvage an element of credibility and a baseline for public trust in the parliament. But their votes were no match for the combined Labor and the Coalition votes on the other side.
At the time, a separate statutory review of the operation of the FOI act led by Allan Hawke had been completed, but the government had not received Hawke’s report. The terms of reference for the review included consideration of "the appropriateness of the range of agencies covered, either in part or in whole." One relevant issue was FOI coverage of the parliament. The report, when released later in June, recommended coverage in respect of parliament’s administrative functions.
The arguments for FOI coverage are clear. The accountability and transparency framework should apply to all government agencies in principle. The three departments in question administer over $170 million in taxpayers funds. Some of this is spent on entitlements and support for members and senators. FOI coverage of parliament is accepted in the UK, Scotland, South Africa, India, Ireland, Mexico and the state of Tasmania. To name just two influential voices, both The Australian Law Reform Commission and former clerk of the Senate Harry Evans supported extension of the FOI act to the departments.
In addition, scrutiny seems warranted in light of comments about the Department of Parliamentary Services by senator John Faulkner in a Senate Estimates hearing in February this year. According to Faulkner, the department “had been the worst administered department I had seen in all my time in parliament, and I have had plenty of experience on both sides of the table and dealt with plenty of what I think might be inadequate administrative practices. Nothing comes close to what we were facing in the department of parliamentary services. Yes, it has improved, and I think everyone on this side of the table is grateful for that, but there is still a very critical issue here about oversight and how we got to the situation that we did."
There was no justification in June for the "interim measure to exclude the parliament from the FOI act. For a government serious about addressing the trust deficit, restoring FOI coverage should be high on the list of priorities.
