Scott Ludlam (WA, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to make a couple of brief comments about a launch that I attended on Friday across from the ACT Assembly with my Greens ACT colleague Caroline Le Couteur, who is the ACT Greens spokesperson on Gov2.0. It is good that we have Senator Lundy in the chamber tonight who has done a lot of work at a federal level on Gov2.0 initiatives. I want to highlight tonight some really interesting examples that have been set by my ACT colleagues in this space that take what has been attempted at a federal level and pushed it further. This is something that I have a great deal of interest in: the idea that government at any level—whatever the tier—moves from a culture of withholding information in our own good, as it were, to a culture of disclosure and transparency, where even freedom of information requests become redundant because the information is simply in the public domain in the first place, not in filing cabinets in basements and not in proprietary digital formats that become obsolete and can only be read in certain kinds of reader. In the spirit of generosity and transparency, government information should be provided in ways where it becomes extremely accessible for researchers, journalists and, perhaps most importantly, for the general public and for the citizenry.

We have seen, as I said, some really interesting progress in this direction at the Commonwealth level. It is something that the Australian Greens are very supportive of and want to extend, but tonight I just want to draw attention to the work of my ACT colleagues for taking this agenda and pushing it a degree further. The ACT is placed very well to be a national leader on transparency and accountability. Canberra is an extremely tax-savvy community, it is a very connected community and it is a very educated community. What better place than here, the seat of the national parliament, to be not merely trialling but bringing out at a mainstream scale the introduction of Gov2.0 principles—not as a pilot or a test bed but actually making it accessible to people.

As my colleague Ms Le Couteur points out, part of being transparent as a government is not waiting to be asked for a document but providing it to the community proactively and in an easily accessible format. We have ways of presenting information in this place, from the huge masses of statistical data and other forms of data that the government produces, using visualisation tools and techniques that simply did not exist a couple of years ago. We certainly should be putting information into these formats and then letting the community rip. The GovHack project is a really interesting example of how this can work. When people are given access to the tools and the ability to just go for it, we have seen some very interesting tools emerge for looking deeply into government, particularly into budget processes and so on.

What has been proposed in the ACT initiative around open and accountable government is to develop a charter and implementation plan for proactive release of public data—not wait for people to come and grab it but put it out. This is a very important example that the Commonwealth government needs to take heed of, because in some ways the freedom of information laws that passed this place a year or two ago have set us back. The first thing the government did was exempt all the defence and security agencies from FOI, so we cannot even find out mundane or administrative details from inside those agencies. They are just presumed to be above the law. That is not good enough. We are also seeing departments beginning to game the freedom of information process. Just as one example, in my efforts to get basic information about the Australian government's approach to dealing with Julian Assange and the WikiLeaks organisation, we found delay and frustration at every turn with the loopholes that I presume were deliberately written into the Commonwealth Freedom of Information Act. This is something that my ACT colleagues would propose simply could not occur anymore at an ACT level. We could do very well to follow their example.

There are proposals to fund innovative projects from the Gov2.0 community. As I said, there is a very tech-savvy community here. We need to give people access to the tools and the raw data and see what kind of magic they can work. There is a proposal to employ a digital records officer to transition to a consistent whole-of-government records system. Just as one example that I have been interested in for a while, if you want to find out how much the Commonwealth spends on advertising, it is very difficult to do. You will need to go through department by department, one after the other, and ask them, using either parliamentary questions or the estimates process, to find out, in a whole-of-government sense, how much is spent on advertising. It is entirely possible these days to simply put that data into the public domain so that it can be searched, cross-referenced and published. It should not be something that people have to pull out like teeth.

I certainly believe that we can do a lot more between the budget process that will give the general public access to the kinds of tools that we have in here and give us greater tools to be able to understand exactly what it is that government is doing. I would like to commend my colleagues in the territory Assembly for putting this vision forward—not simply dealing with it at a prototype level but actually looking at what a genuinely digitally connected ACT government would look like. These are examples that I believe we should adopt here in the Commonwealth parliament, which deals with vastly larger quantities of data—much of it still locked away and inaccessible for no other reason than nobody has ever really thought to put it into the public domain. I do recognise and acknowledge progress that has made in this regard, but we are yet to see it established right across government. There are still areas, department by department and minister by minister, where the processes and the internal workings of government are absolutely opaque and impenetrable. I am not suggesting that simply making all this data accessible to the general public is the answer to that. There is something cultural here as well as technological that needs to be achieved, but I congratulate my ACT colleagues for pointing out what I think will be a very important way to promote government transparency and accountability in the 21st century.