Statutes Amendment Bill

Members, we come to Part 21. This is the debate on clauses 84 to 85, “Amendment to Inquiries Act 2013”. The question is that Part 21 stand part.

Thank you, Mr Chair. In terms of these statutes amendment bills being simply clarification, it’s pretty well entrenched. It’s just been a few occasions where I think it’s at least arguable that they’ve gone a bit beyond that—and, you know, the immigration one we’ve talked about before kind of expanded rather than clarified.

This is another one where the Public Records Act—sorry, the Inquiries Act; this is the interface of the Inquiries Act with the Public Records Act. The original phrasing in section 33(4) of the Inquiries Act simply says that “for the purposes of Part 3

This is quite important, because previously if an inquiry said “Operation Burnham: this is top secret or this is confidential—this is secret information”, the Chief Archivist could generally make a judgment about that, and doesn’t actually have to keep stuff which is classified—classified forever. He or she could say, “Well, in my view, 10 years has passed and there’s a high public interest in this coming out, so I’m going to release it, or I’m going to release it in part”—or whatever. But all of a sudden, in new subsection (4A), it says that “must act consistently with the order” means that “if the order forbids publication of any thing described in [the sections]…to that thing as restricted access records as defined in [the section]”, then they’ve got to do that.

I’m concerned that this is actually making things more secret, in overriding what historically has been a wide discretion of the Chief Archivist to make a call on when things should be declassified. We can see from things like Operation Burnham that sometimes there’s a significant public interest in that declassification—because I think we sometimes miss how important our archivist is in both not just keeping and caring for our public records but also in making sure that they are made public when it’s appropriate to do so.

So because the section says, you know, “replace subsection (4)”, but then it introduces an entire new subsection (4A), which doesn’t just explain what “act consistently with the order” means, which is the new concept, because we’ve moved from section 33, “take into account any order” to “act consistently with the order”, and that’s a significantly different thing. I’d be interested in the Minister’s comments on that.

Thank you, Mr Chair. This amendment is to more clearly enable the relevant department to review or change the public access settings to historical inquiry records. That is the objective of this change. It’s not creating anything new—it’s just clarifying what is already the status quo. I note that the member thought that there could be files hidden. One would actually be a bit more optimistic than that and think that there would be files opened.

Part 21 agreed to.

Part 22 Amendments to Juries Act 1981