Anne Ruston (SA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

You have probably a greater understanding of the FOI Act than many of us in here, but there is obviously a balance between the procurement rules that exist around how we operate with procurement and making sure that the rules are applied in such a way that would mitigate against this kind of thing happening in the first place. Obviously, if a government agency decides to go for a limited tender, they would do so in the belief that they have been able to clearly define who was available or who within that marketplace it was appropriate to seek that tender from. The rules state that there must never be any intention to exclude somebody who otherwise might have been an appropriate source for that particular procurement.

In terms of FOI and the access to particular pieces of information and the like, there are obviously rules around commercial in confidence and the commercial documentation. To go back to your previous discussions in relation to Defence et cetera, there will be a series of other things that sit around decisions about what information might or might not be available in a particular process. I think, if you put those two side by side, there is a level of safety mechanism in place that would suggest that, first of all, it's highly unlikely that this situation would occur in the first place, and, if it did, it would have to be determined on the merit of the particular action on the basis of whether the information being sought was something that was actually going to prejudice another party to this particular contract because of the commercial nature of the information that was being sought.