Information & Ethics Committee on March 7th, 2011

[John McMillan]

--that cultural attitude is being addressed better.

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

Pardon me for interrupting, Mr. McMillan. Back home, who exactly decides what information will be disclosed with regard to national security or personal information? Who acts as a filter? How do you handle such issues back home, in Australia?

[John McMillan]

I suppose there are two points. First, under the Freedom of Information Act any person can request access to any document, and if they're denied access they can appeal to my office. My office now has a determinative power, much like a court or a tribunal, to decide whether the documents are exempt or not. We apply the FOI exemption criteria, but at the end of the day we have the determinative power. The ultimate say on document disclosure no longer rests with any government agency or minister; it now rests with an independent office--my own. That's one aspect.

The other change is that there is a whole range of government agencies responsible for different aspects of information management, such as copyright, national security, privacy, electronic management, document retention and destruction--

[Carole Freeman, Bloc, Châteauguay—Saint-Constant, QC]

Hold on a second. I understand what you are trying to tell us, but you cannot possibly proceed on a case-by-case basis when deciding whether to allow access to a document or not. You must have rules that have been established to determine what documents concern national security, personal information, and so on. There must be some sort of information release mechanism. You cannot use the case-by-case approach each time and make decisions arbitrarily. You must have a mechanism that has been pre-established or prescribed.

[John McMillan]

No, it's not. There are any number of rules on security protection. There are security classification processes. There are any number of guidelines on protection of personal information.

In the first instance it rests with the government agency to apply those rules and decide what to release. While the government has urged agencies to publish far more and be more proactive, substantial discretion and initiative rest with the agencies.

That's where freedom of information becomes important, because it confers the legal right on members of the public to request any document they want. So it enables an individual to drive the question about whether an individual document should be disclosed. Now the individual can come directly to my office, free of charge, for an independent review on any document disclosure issue.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you, Madam Freeman.

Mr. Siksay, you have seven minutes.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you, Chair.

Thank you, Commissioner McMillan, for taking the time this morning to be with us. Sorry about our distractions, but we'll move along.

I wonder if you can let me know where things are at now with the Government 2.0 taskforce document. It was a very extensive document. There were lots of recommendations and detail in that. Did the Australian government accept the document in its entirety? Where are we with implementation of all the detailed recommendations in that?

[John McMillan]

The government issued a policy statement last year accepting most of the recommendations. The declaration of open government I referred to earlier is an example of the government implementation of one of the recommendations.

The government also established a steering group located within the Department of Finance, with representatives of different offices, including the Attorney General's department, the National Archives, the Australian Bureau of Statistics, and my own office. That steering group has been responsible for ensuring that all of the recommendations are implemented. The members of that steering group have been meeting fairly regularly. There has been no report published as such, but there is an update on the Department of Finance Gov 2.0 website.

At the end of the day--and this hearkens back to the earlier question--a large number of government agencies have a role to play in information policy. That will never change. So the responsibility will be distributed around government. The main challenge is to ensure greater coordination between all of the different agencies that have a role to play in this area. That's one of the things that the Government 2.0 steering group is trying to do. It's also one of the objectives of my office.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Have you seen any decline in the traditional request-and-respond approach to freedom of information since this open government policy went into place? Has there been any change in the number of those kinds of requests?

[John McMillan]

At the moment, the information is anecdotal only; we haven't received the early statistics from agencies. We do require agencies to report to us on a quarterly basis, but we're still at the anecdotal stage. The operation commenced on November 1.

Anecdotally, every one of the major agencies does report that there is an increase in requests, particularly from journalists. There's a noticeable increase in the number of articles in the national media that are sourced from information and disclosure requests. They are in quite routine reporting, as well. It's become a feature that journalists will mention if freedom of information disclosures have been an element in the development of their stories.

Now, whether that continues, it's hard to predict. One of the government expectations is that agencies will be publishing more, putting things online, and that will make it unnecessary for individuals to make requests. It's entirely speculative at the moment as to what trends will develop.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Commissioner, how do the Government 2.0 taskforce recommendations correspond with the major infrastructure project in terms of the broadband network that the Australian government announced? Are they interlinked? Is the broadband network infrastructure project crucial?

[John McMillan]

There's been no interlink there, at all. There are examples, I suppose, of policy initiatives in government that all have a common element, namely, information and technology, but there's been no connection between them. The national broadband network has been principally focused on a rollout of an optic fibre cable network around the country so that individuals have fast downloads from a fixed portal in their homes.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

I know it's early, but has there been any analysis of the economic benefits of the publication of public sector information and any indication that it's done anything with regard to employment? Are people getting jobs as a result of seeing more freely available government information?

[John McMillan]

That's one of the large and substantial issues, the cost-benefit analysis, and in particular the economic and social utility of information that is published online--does it, as it's often said, stimulate innovation?

One of the recommendations of the Government 2.0 taskforce is that a project be initiated to develop a methodology for measuring the social and economic utility of government information that is released to the public. The taskforce recommended that my office develop the methodology, and we're currently in that process.

Again, you can pick some individual examples. One interesting one is a government website initiative called My School, which has collected all of the information held by government on school funding, student performance, curriculum development, and the like. When you look at the figures on the number of downloads that occur within the 48 hours after there's an update to the site, it's quite staggering. You see the national debate it initiates at school level, parent level, teacher level, and at national planning level on school performance in Australia.

It's a great case study in the extraordinary value and interest that government information has to all aspects of national life when innovative steps are taken to assemble it and make it available to the public.

[Bill Siksay, NDP, Burnaby—Douglas, BC]

Thank you.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you, Mr. Siksay.

Mr. Albrecht, for seven minutes.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

Thank you, Mr. Chair.

Thank you, Mr. McMillan, for agreeing to meet with us so early in your day. It's certainly appreciated.

I'm wondering if you could give our committee some insight into what types of data sets have been the most popular in terms of the requests you're seeing and in the downloading of information. You just mentioned the kinds of articles that are being printed. Could you tell me what types of data sets are most popular?

Then, in terms of prioritizing, how did your government decide which types of data sets or which information to prioritize in terms of its early implementation?

[John McMillan]

We're at a very early stage in that aspect of open government, of collection of government data sets for publication.

Up until now there has been a lot of activity, but it has been fairly fragmented. Our feeling is that we've had a lot to learn from other countries. Some of the best examples are collected in a chapter in this issues paper that's available on our website called “Towards an Australian Government Information Policy”. One example I've just given is the My School website, which has simply brought together all of the information held by government on school funding, individual student performance at different schools, and the like.

Another big innovation is through an organization called Geoscience Australia. In earlier days, it was our Bureau of Mineral Resources, which simply mapped where minerals were located under the ground throughout Australia. This organization, Geoscience Australia, has now developed a much broader focus on publication of spatial data; that is, collecting together all the information held at different levels in Australia about the spatial data on what's under the ground, on the ground, or can be observed from above the ground. That's bringing together information about minerals, maps, watercourses, planning, and the like. That's been an innovation.

Just as a digression, it is sometimes said that over 80% of all government information has an address on it. It's a good example of how you can simply collect together all information held by any government agency with an address and all of a sudden have a different picture of the country.

There are other examples referred to in the paper on the collection of information, for example, about heritage, the heritage information held by government agencies. That's at the early stage. The Australian Bureau of Statistics, I might say, has also been a national and international leader in making available, not just in the download form but also in a form that can be reused, all the information that it has collected through its different census-raising activity.

The other example I might mention as a final example is that the Australian Taxation Office is developing a national business register. Now, as you can imagine, the Australian Taxation Office has an unrivalled collection of data about every taxpayer and business in Australia, where they're located, what they're doing, what their performance has been over the years. And currently on a restricted but soon on an open basis, it's making that information available so that, for example, a local government organization can go into the national business register held by the taxation office and find all the anonymized data on economic activity within its own local government area, and that all of a sudden stimulates different planning activity in that area.

[Harold Albrecht, Conservative, Kitchener—Conestoga, ON]

You may just be in the early implementation stages, but you are ahead of us not only in your time this morning—or tomorrow morning—but also in the implementation. I'm just wondering if you've found any commonality in your studies for the Government 2.0 initiative or other research that your government did prior to implementing the open government initiative.

Was there commonality across countries and across different government levels in terms of the types of data sets that were available so that a country like Canada, for example, could say that given the experience of countries from one to twenty, the likelihood of a commonality emerging is quite great?

[John McMillan]

Unfortunately, I'm not in a position to give a very informed answer on that question.

Perhaps I can say that when my office was created, bringing together FOI privacy and information policy, our skills and our expertise was in the FOI and privacy space, but I think the thing that has struck me most of all is that much of the interest within government and in the community is in the information policy space. So nearly all the questions and nearly all the invitations to speak that I get are all about the information policy space.

The other thing we've learned is just how fragmented the whole system was. There were quite a number of agencies, all with considerable expertise, all working individually. I know I've mentioned the Archives office, our Australian Government Information Management Office, the Bureau of Statistics, Geoscience Australia, and so on, but there was very little integration between them. So it's been very hard for us, both in my office but also nationally, to kind of measure how we match up.

But there are some very promising initiatives. For example, there's a government website, called data.gov.au, under which governments are expected to load all of their data sets. So that in itself will drive that common practice element.

If I could just give one example of that, one of the responsibilities of my office is to implement what is called the information publication scheme, which is a scheme requiring all government agencies to publish the same information about their structure, their organization, their personnel, their data sets. It's an extraordinary but unique exercise in a whole-of-government exercise.

The information publication scheme really is the first time that anybody has said that if all 220 government agencies have to publish similar information, this is how you should do it: on your website, this is the icon—the link you should have—so any member of the public can go in there and find their way in, and these are the minimum requirements for every government agency. So it's only now, through this new scheme, that we're really in that process of establishing uniform, consistent, whole-of-government practice and principles.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Thank you very much, Mr. Albrecht.

[John McMillan]

It's the advantage of having an office such as mine, if I may say so.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

We only have a few minutes left, but there's one issue I want to get your comment on, Mr. McMillan. You indicated that in Australia, you, as information commissioner, have the power to order departments and agencies to produce documents. We don't have that in Canada. Can you just comment as to when that came into effect? Is it working well, and do you recommend it?

[John McMillan]

It's part of the scheme surrounding the creation of my office. Now, essentially we have simply been given the same power as the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, which, until now, heard all appeals on FOI access. We've been given the same powers as it, the same powers as a court, essentially, to require a government agency to provide any documents to us, to answer any questions that we ask, and then I can make the binding ruling on whether the document is exempt under the FOI framework.

Now, I think that is essential. One of the key elements of a true FOI reform process is that the ultimate decision on document disclosure has to reside outside government in an independent office. Of course, some decisions that I make are appealable firstly to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal and through that to the court system, so that ensures adequate safeguards and control on appropriate use of all these powers.

[The Chair, Liberal, Shawn Murphy]

Okay, thank you, Mr. McMillan.

We're down to the last few minutes. I will allow the official opposition two minutes and the government members four minutes, and that will conclude our time.

Mr. Easter, two minutes.