Thank you very much, Mr. Chair.
Good morning to the members of the Standing Committee on Access to Information, Privacy and Ethics. It's a pleasure to speak to you about Australian experience.
Australia has been in the fortunate position over the years of being able to learn a great deal from Canada in the area of freedom of information and privacy protection. Indeed, Canada was ahead of Australia in combining both areas into a single framework. And I hope we have some experience that may be of interest and assistance to you, as well.
Australia is currently going through the most substantial open government reform process to have occurred for nearly three decades. Since the Freedom of Information Act was first enacted in Australia in 1982 and the Privacy Act in 1988, there's been steady development in those areas of information rights and information management. But there was a common feeling in Australia that the process had stalled and that there was need for substantial improvement.
Currently we have, as I say, a substantial reform program that has both a legislative reform element and a policy reform element. The legislative reform element consists primarily of a law at the national level to amend the Freedom of Information Act and a law to establish a new office, which I head, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. I'll come back to that in a moment.
The policy reform element arises from a number of reports that have been commissioned by the national government in recent years to look at all aspects of information management, with a particular focus on electronic records management and on creating a culture of open government through more innovative use of technology. It's often coined the Gov 2.0 initiative because of the heavy reliance on the use of the Web 2.0 tools. And my office has a role to play in that area. Indeed, the members of the committee may be aware that one of the first activities of my office was the publication of an issues paper called “Towards an Australian Government Information Policy”, which drew together all the themes of the policy reform process that had occurred in recent years.
But the office I head, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, is a key element in the national reform process. A distinguishing feature of the office is that it brings together three areas: freedom of information, privacy protection, and information policy. There are three commissioners to head the office. They include me--the Information Commissioner--as well as a Freedom of Information Commissioner, and a Privacy Commissioner, which is an established position that's been merged into the office.
The office has a significant range of powers to undertake, from complaint investigation to tribunal merit reviews of individual agency decisions on document access. It also has an extensive role in monitoring agency practice in FOI and privacy, undertaking legislative reviews, advising the government, publishing guidelines, conducting training, and the like.
Indeed, the office itself is an innovation in government oversight. The practice in Australia, and I know to some extent in Canada, is to distribute all those oversight functions--complaint handling, merit review, training, promotion of open government--among different oversight bodies. But here they have been all collected together in a single office.
The office commenced operation on November 1 last year. Our early experience is that the open government and information policy reform process have strongly taken root in Australia.
The chief objective of the government was to initiate a process of cultural change within government. My clear impression is that cultural change is occurring. There has been a strong commitment among government agencies, particularly in the middle levels, to introduce the new reforms. Agencies have been committed, in a way we have not seen in the past, to ensuring the smooth processing of FOI requests. Indeed, hardly a day passes now when there are not articles in national newspapers that are rooted in FOI requests. They're not necessarily of the scandal, shock, or horror variety, but just routine reporting that relies heavily on freedom of information requests.
The other marked change is the cultural change at the senior levels within agencies. One of the first things I did was indicate to agencies that I was happy to address the senior management of all of the major departments on this open government reform process. I've been invited to meet the senior management of nearly all agencies now.
That kind of senior-level engagement about freedom of information and open government reform has simply never occurred before in Australia. Freedom of information was hitherto regarded more as a peripheral irritant by the leaders of many agencies. They now regard it as a responsibility of senior management to drive the cultural reform process within agencies.
The connection between freedom of information and all other aspects of information management has also been well established. For example, my office is now engaged in a whole range of projects concerned with electronic records management and destruction, freeing up copyright controls on government information so it's more available to others, cross-portfolio integration of data sets, promotion of greater publication by agencies, and the like. So freedom of information now has a firm connection to the policy reform process that's an integral feature of ensuring a proper well-based system of open government.
There's considerable talk in that space about the idea of creating a national information policy. There's considerable interest, in particular, in ten draft principles for a national information policy on reuse of government information. That was promoted by my office in the issues paper I mentioned earlier.
Members of the committee, thank you for the opportunity to make those initial remarks. I look forward to further discussion.
I understand that there is an issue before the committee. I perhaps should say that I unfortunately have to leave by 8:30, which is in just over 40 minutes. I have to open a conference in Canberra at nine this morning, but I'll look forward to further discussion.
Thank you.