After he became Opposition Leader in 2019, Anthony Albanese – now Prime Minister – delivered a speech that set out the accountability and integrity agenda for an Albanese Government.

The future prime minister said:

Anthony Albanese identified donation disclosures, parliamentary debate of the decision to go to war, standing orders to ensure ministers give sensible answers in Question Time, and the whole Uluru Statement, including truth-telling, as priorities.

What happened to this speech? I don’t just mean, what happened to its noble sentiments, I mean literally what happened to the transcript?

Well, it was quietly removed from the Prime Minister’s website earlier this year. Yes, the speech on the importance of transparency disappeared.

If that happened on an episode of Utopia, you’d say they were laying it on a bit thick.

To be fair, when journalist Mark Di Stefano made inquiries, the absence was blamed on a technical issue and the speech quickly restored.²

But the sentiment behind the speech is still missing from the Albanese Government’s agenda.

At this, the inaugural Transparency Summit, you have heard that:

• Payments to political parties below about $16,000 are still hidden from scrutiny and even payments that exceed the threshold are not disclosed for up to 18 months,
• Whistleblowers are being prosecuted and sentenced to jail,
•  We have a National Anti-Corruption Commission prevented from holding public hearings unless there are exceptional circumstances.
• We do not yet have a whistleblower protection authority,
• And disability advocates – this came up in the webinar – have been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements if they want to be consulted on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, preventing them from consulting their own members.

And there’s many more missed opportunities for transparency that we couldn’t cover in just one day:

• Payments to political parties below about $16,000 are still hidden from scrutiny, and even payments that exceed the threshold are not disclosed for up to eighteen months.
• Who ministers are meeting with, and what they are talking about, remains secret – despite diary disclosure policies being common in state government.
  We know more about the Queensland Shadow Minister for Customer Service’s diary than we do the Prime Minister’s.
• The Department of Parliamentary Services has been excluded from freedom of information law – an “interim” measure that has survived over 10 years.³
• Whistleblowers are being prosecuted and sentenced to jail.
• We have a National Anti-Corruption Commission prevented from holding public hearings unless there are exceptional circumstances, and we do not have a whistleblower protection authority.
• Disability advocates have been forced to sign non-disclosure agreements if they want to be consulted on the National Disability Insurance Scheme, preventing those groups from consulting their own members and stakeholders.⁴
• And we are still waiting for a First Nations truth and justice commission.⁵

It is only fair to note that there have been welcome improvements under the Albanese Government.

Even as whistleblowers were prosecuted, one tranche of whistleblower law reforms were legislated – and Julian Assange was freed.

The National Anti-Corruption Commission was created, and has been operating for over a year now – albeit without yet holding public hearings.

Advertising for positions publicly and with a merits-based appointment process occurred even before the abolition of the politically compromised Administrative Appeals Tribunal, and that tribunal’s replacement is a major improvement.

And appointments to the ABC Board have returned to the open, arms-length process established when Labor was last in government ten years ago.

But on balance, when it comes to transparency the Albanese Government more closely resembles the Coalition governments that preceded it than it does “a big dose of Australian sunshine” – the promise of Anthony Albanese in Opposition.

Secrecy is not security

The public’s right to information, regardless of which party is in power, has been treated as something to be traded off against national security concerns.

But what we have heard today, at the inaugural Transparency Summit, is that transparency reinforces security, it makes us safer – and in the long term, open governments do better.

The Robodebt scandal hangs over the Coalition’s time in government, rightfully so, as a cruel, irrational and illegal scheme. It is well reported that it damaged Australians’ health and wellbeing, including being linked to the deaths of people who were ordered to repay debts they never owed.

Robodebt operated under a veil of secrecy, stripped away by the forensic work of the Royal Commission. Ministers used cabinet confidentiality as an excuse to lie to the public, and senior public servants operated on a wink and a nudge to bury the warnings.

In a more open government, alarm bells would have gone off sooner; more people would have heard them; and politicians and bureaucrats would have made better choices – if only to save their own skins. Secrecy around Robodebt carried a very real human cost.

Secrecy is not security.

But don’t take my word for it. Listen to how governments talks about secrecy, when it is your secrets they are interested in.

Whether it is access to your metadata without a warrant; forcing backdoors into encrypted messaging; or allowing the incidental interception of domestic communications; governments have been eager to access your private information.⁶

Here, it is privacy that is traded off against security. More information supposedly makes us safer, but at the cost of surveillance, stigmatisation and interference.

There’s a formal term for it in the academic literature: the privacy versus security trade off.

Did you catch that? The government’s secrets are keeping us safe. Their transparency comes at a cost to security. Your secrets are putting us in danger. Your privacy comes at a cost to security.

Many in this room would have security clearance, or been a referee for someone getting their clearance. When you undergo a security clearance, the government is not impressed by your ability to keep a secret. Quite the opposite. They say that any information – whether it is your history, your politics, your relationships or your use of drugs and alcohol – can be managed, provided it is known. It is the unknown, the secret, that can compromise security and make someone an unsafe public servant.

In fact, so unconcerned is the government with your secrets that security clearances are often conducted by private contractors, even the positive vetting required of department secretaries, agency heads and senior military officers. The secrets of our public servants are not even in public hands!

This hypocritical attitude to secrecy from the highest in government is common. Journalist James Reston quipped that “The ship of state is the only vessel that leaks from the top.”

Not even the 368 billion dollar nuclear submarines program is immune to this phenomenon. Boris Johnson revealed this month that while UK Prime Minister, he “got revenge” on French President Emmanuel Macron by persuading Australia to drop its deal with France and buy submarines from the UK and US instead.

Do you feel any safer for having that political nugget kept from you for years?

The Australian public shouldn’t be finding out the spite behind our submarine policy in a score-settling autobiography. But there has always been a double standard. The government elected in your name is allowed to leak when it benefits them, and to crush the whistleblowers who leak when it benefits the public.

Connecting the stonewalled

One of the objectives of the Transparency Summit is to bring together those who have been stonewalled. When he launched the Australia Institute thirty years ago, the Hon Justice Michael Kirby – then President of the NSW Court of Appeal – thrilled at the broad remit promised by the institute’s name. A think tank named The Australia Institute could research almost anything.

Sure enough, the Australia Institute has experienced the culture of secrecy in Australian governments in just about every way you can imagine: whether it is freedom of information, whistleblowing, patchy data, governments defying their statutory responsibilities, or consultants’ reports hiding behind dubious commercial in confidence claims.

I put in a freedom of information request regarding Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s “negative globalism” speech, which he delivered in 2019. It is the year of our Lord 2024, and it has still not been resolved: five years after that speech was delivered and four years after my FOI request. Delay is a form of denial.

The Australia Institute has doggedly pursued the consultants’ reports on which dubious government decisions are made, and criticised the willingness of senior public servants to cede policy-making and strategy to mercenary consultants.

And as keen observers of the Senate, we see Parliament’s demands for documents and answers from government bear fruit, but often in the face of recalcitrance and feet-dragging.

Nor can we rely on law reform alone.

Last month, the Rockliff Liberal Government in Tasmania published the first State of the Environment Report in 15 years – a report it is required by law to produce every five years. It took the threat of legal action for the Tasmanian Government to fulfill its statutory obligation.

The report’s findings include that:

• Greenhouse gas emissions are falling well short of what scientists say is needed to secure a safe climate.
• Two environmental indicators have improved, 16 have declined.
• 11 fish stocks are depleting or depleted and
• Tasmania has amongst the highest loss of forests of any Australian jurisdiction.

Are Tasmanians safer for having the perilous state of the environment kept from them for a decade? The state’s food security, biodiversity and natural disaster preparedness is worse because the government’s desire to avoid embarrassment proved stronger than not just the public interest, but even the law of the land.

This is not a problem with freedom of information law, though it could be improved; of whistleblower protections, though they are sorely lacking; or of parliamentary processes. Nor do the problems exist at one level of government only, or in one political party. These problems are manifestations of the deeper issue: that Australian governments find it useful to act in secrecy.

Just look at the advice the Albanese Government circulated to senior public servants ahead of Senate Estimates this year. If asked a numerical question, the public servant may – “if applicable” answer “The data requested is not captured centrally and obtaining it would be an unreasonable diversion of resources”.

If asked about briefing materials, a suggested response is “The release of documents would restrict the ability of officials and ministers to assist Committee hearings”.

This is not parliamentary language. Odgers’ Australian Senate Practice does not allow for a department to avoid questions if it cannot be bothered keeping track of how many consultants it hires, or how many external retreats it runs, or how many interdepartmental committees it is involved in. Nor does parliamentary practice allow officials and ministers to keep their crib notes secret if they are embarrassed by them.

This stonewalling, unparliamentary language comes from freedom of information law. Whereas the ancient rights of Parliament were won through centuries of bloody battle and political manoeuvring, freedom of information is recent and much more limited. But having honed their excuses denying the public’s freedom of information requests, the bureaucracy uses the same language and the same excuses against the Parliament.

Our hope with this, the inaugural Transparency Summit, is to forge connections between FOI applicants and parliamentarians, between whistleblowers and policy-makers, behind a common cause – to expose the workings of government to public scrutiny, to make government work better and, more importantly, to make it work for the people it is meant to represent.

The public is hungry for transparency.

Transparency as an election issue

The 2022 federal election was in large part an integrity election after scandals and controversies that continue to cast a pall (“paul”) over Australian politics. Neither Robodebt nor the Paladin affair have been resolved. Even the election did not put an end to scandal, with the revelation that Scott Morrison had gotten himself appointed to multiple secret ministries coming five months after the election that deposed him from those ministries.

With the next federal election due by May next year, its themes are already taking shape. Economic justice, housing and the cost of living will naturally dominate. So too will the failure to listen to the science on climate change, which gets more urgent with each year.

But the issue of transparency deserves its place as an election priority. Transparency is fundamental to everything else the government does. Few integrity scandals would have happened if the perpetrators had believed that their wrongdoing would be immediately and widely disclosed. We could have more confidence in the defence of our nation if procurement processes were not shrouded in secrecy; if maladministration were not hidden behind national security excuses. And if there is another pandemic, the public’s consent to health measures will depend in large part on whether they trust and are brought into decision-making processes.

Management consultants, lobbyists and senior public servants would not be so willing to provide ministers with shabby and self-serving advice if they knew that a freedom of information request could expose that advice in a timely and comprehensive manner.

Australia Institute polling research, conducted over many years, confirms that Australians care about transparency.

• Three in five Australians say that no one should have to wait more than 30 days for their freedom of information request to be decided.⁷
• Two in three say that the NACC should be able to hold public hearings whenever they are in the public interest.⁸
• Seven in 10 agree that the Senate should use its powers to make reports written for the Government by private consultants public,⁹ the same number who agree that whistleblower protections for public servants should be strengthened.
• Three in four say that whistleblowers make Australia a better place.¹⁰
• Four in five support the introduction of a whistleblower protection authority.
• And more than four in five say that a senior public servant misleading Cabinet or the Parliament is corrupt conduct.

Few issues attract such broad and consistent support as the cause of open government.

Parliamentarians and would-be parliamentarians neglect transparency at their peril. The public will not be convinced by a false security versus transparency trade off when the cost of secrecy is maladministration, environmental degradation, and gaps in the nation’s defence.

Thank you.