The Saturday Paper, 14 August 2021:
The prime minister may no longer be able to use a special one-man cabinet committee to so readily conceal government advice from public view, after a judge rejected it as a way to keep national cabinet’s deliberations secret.
Contrary to the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet’s insistence, a ruling by Justice Richard White in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal (AAT) confirmed that all working documents for the meetings of federal, state and territory leaders are accessible under freedom of information law.
The government cannot cover them retrospectively by taking them to federal cabinet either, because their legal status is based on their purpose when they are created.
The ruling potentially has implications beyond national cabinet because of the mechanism Prime Minister Scott Morrison used to extend federal cabinet’s secrecy provisions. That mechanism is the cabinet office policy committee, or COPC.
Since creating it in 2019, Morrison has used this committee, of which he is the only permanent member, to extend cabinet confidentiality over anything he wants shielded from public view.
He simply declares particular meetings to be configurations of the policy committee and asserts cabinet secrecy over their deliberations. This is how he claimed cabinet secrecy when the old Council of Australian Governments was renamed “national cabinet” last year.
But Justice White ruled that simply calling national cabinet a federal cabinet committee did not make it one. He confirmed that a cabinet committee featured members of a single cabinet, from a single government and parliament. While he did not rule out external members, he found that having one federal cabinet minister was not enough.
It’s expected the senate’s Covid-19 inquiry will now seek to have numerous documents handed over, after various departments first refused access to them, citing cabinet secrecy via COPC. [my yellow highlighting]
Justice White was ruling on an application to the AAT by independent senator Rex Patrick, made after the prime minister’s department rejected two freedom of information (FOI) requests last year.
“Fundamentally, what he’s done, is to create a device that he hopes will bring all these entities under the umbrella. But it is a device and it’s an illusory device.”
Read the full article here.
On 8 April 2020, the Senate resolved to establish a Select Committee on COVID-19 to inquire into the Australian Government’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Thus far public hearings have been held between 23 April 2020 and 31 July 2021 and two interim reports have been produced to date. This Inquiry is due to present its final report on or before 30 June 2022.
The committee has not set a due date for submissions and has decided it will consider submissions provided throughout the inquiry. Submissions can be sent using the Senate's online submission system or they can be emailed to the committee.
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