Australians tend to think of their country as a robust, liberal democracy. We believe the state rarely intervenes to suppress or censor debate, and we can speak relatively freely about most matters.
In truth, our attitudes towards government information and personal privacy are remarkably less liberal than in many other parts of the Western world. Sweden, for example, enshrined press freedom in law almost 350 years ago. Each year, its government publishes every citizen's income-tax return - and no one has a problem with it. Many other northern and continental European nations embrace the same principle: that every document created by a public servant, whether a memo, report or contract, is published as a matter of course. There are a few exceptions, particularly in the area of national security, but in many of these countries public servants must apply in advance if they wish to suppress information.
In Australia, this assumption tends to be reversed. Our bureaucracies have adopted the comparative secrecy of Whitehall, where information is made public only after weighing up the risks of doing so. Like Britons, Australians have long had strong concerns about their privacy. An example was the vociferous campaign in the 1980s against the Australia Card, a proposal to create a national identification system. The card would have greatly improved the government's ability to combat tax fraud and other rorts, but community suspicion saw it abandoned.
Nonetheless, Australian governments are realising these attitudes are unhelpful, because they can conceal maladministration. It's true that mistakes, when revealed, can embarrass individuals; on the rare occasion, they can even affect elections. But open, honest reflection on policy and administrative shortcomings is how we improve government operations and avoid repeating our errors.
A year ago, the federal Freedom of Information Act was changed to make it easier and cheaper for the public to access government documents. Pointedly, the Act now declares that all information held by the Commonwealth is ''a national resource''. In the ACT, Chief Minister Katy Gallagher has also pledged to improve access to government information, and now routinely publishes cabinet outcomes and the results of FoI requests.
However, many bureaucrats' decisions are not yet reflecting these changes. Today, this newspaper reports on 12 drug overdoses that have occurred inside Canberra's prison. This is the kind of information an effective government agency - one that was genuinely committed to transparency - would have made public immediately. Instead, corrective services staff noted the incidents had the ''potential to attract immediate significant media attention'', but suppressed the reports until The Canberra Times accessed them under FoI law. Public servants also censored pages of details about the overdoses, leaving us with little understanding of what happened or how. The reason for the extensive censorship, corrective services staff said, was to protect individuals' rights to privacy.
We sought neither names nor any other identifying information about those who suffered overdoses; we acknowledge that is irrelevant. But we believe strongly that the public should be told what happened. Are there significant security failings in the jail? What were the circumstances of the overdoses? We remain in the dark.
We are not, as some may believe, demanding that governments feed the media with titillating details about their mistakes. The point of transparency is to share information about errors widely so that the public might learn from them. The other benefits of open scrutiny are that it acts as a deterrent against future mistakes and, most importantly, protects against deliberate wrongdoing.
Last month, the ACT's Health Directorate took a similarly cautious approach when it responded to this newspaper's FoI request for the Canberra Hospital's critical-error reports. Bureaucrats applied their black pens with enthusiasm, censoring the vast majority of the reports. In doing so, they raised more questions than they answered.
Federal bureaucrats also regularly err in favour of censorship rather than transparency, despite official exhortations to be more open. Too often, this newspaper is denied access to entire reports on the basis that a small part of it might refer to an individual or business. Perhaps this risk-aversion stems from public servants' genuine concerns about privacy rights. However, one cannot help but wonder, with some incredulity, at how often governments invoke privacy to avoid public scrutiny.
Australians are right to guard their personal details from being abused, particularly by criminals who could take advantage of them. But that is no excuse for governments to hide their failings and avoid accounting for them.
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