Tuesday, 5 April 2022

Public records

Mr DAVIS (Southern Metropolitan—Leader of the Opposition) (17:34): (1854) My matter for the adjournment tonight is for the attention of the Premier, and it relates to the responsibility that the Premier has for the Public Records Act 1973. The Public Records Act has a clear role in ensuring that key government records in this state are preserved and are treated appropriately with appropriate safeguards and protections. The Public Records Act makes it illegal, for example, to destroy documents or to allow documents to be not protected or to be destroyed gratuitously, and that is for very good reason. That applies also to cabinet documents. I want to put on record my concern—this comes out of some freedom-of-information requests that my office has undertaken both at Development Victoria and the Suburban Rail Loop Authority—that the appropriate protections for cabinet documents and other documents are not being employed. It is clear that documents that are documents of the department or documents of the agency are not being treated appropriately and not being protected.

Mr MacKenzie, who is chair of Development Victoria and also chair of the Suburban Rail Loop Authority, is using a private server. This is also to move cabinet documents around and to communicate with others beyond the agency. Now, as the chair of the body he is obviously entitled to have communications with a range of people, but these documents need to be preserved in the proper way with the proper protections and normal protocols around them. In this case it is clear the agencies, for example, will not search his server for freedom-of-information purposes. They will not check to see what uses he has made of his private server. It is only to the extent that the chair of these bodies has emailed the agency or they have emailed him. Emails between his server and others that he is interacting with are not captured by these FOIs and are not, as far as we can tell, preserved and treated as proper documents of the agency. Now, the agency actually has a responsibility to do that. We are not interested in his personal emails, we are only interested in the emails which he employs or uses for the purposes of the business of the agency.

So I ask that the Premier intervene to ensure that the Public Records Act is being adhered to in every way and that documents are secure. This is Hillary Clinton all over again—an outrageous misuse of public resources. It is corrupt and really very, very unsound. I must say that this has got to be stopped.