It's a flex of government muscle that should trouble anyone who cares about democracy.
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For years governments have batted away requests for information by using what's becoming the excuse of all political excuses. Journalists venturing into the freedom of information labyrinth are familiar with it. Senators deal with it, too. Governments are refusing to answer questions, or release documents that should be public, by claiming that doing so would breach cabinet confidentiality.
Did I hear a dog eating someone's homework?
There's a convention that discussions in cabinet meetings remain confidential, one that serves the legitimate purpose of allowing senior ministers to deliberate freely together. It's become a tradition invoked for increasingly spurious reasons, evolving into a catch-all excuse for governments trying to escape scrutiny.
The COVID-19 crisis has accelerated the trend. Ministers on multiple occasions have uttered their confidentiality hex - "it's cabinet in confidence" - in an attempt to stymie requests for information from a Senate inquiry into the government's public health and economic response to the pandemic. They do so using what's called a public interest immunity claim - as the name suggests, a bid to refuse information on the basis that its release would undermine the public interest.
Power has flowed away from the legislature to the executive since federation. On this occasion, executive government's hexing and flexing sets a dangerous precedent for the Senate's ability to hold it to account. The bureaucracy is complicit, knowingly or not, having invoked cabinet confidentiality to refuse information.
Senators have drawn a line in the sand. Last week, the Senate committee released a report excoriating the government's repeated intransigence in refusing to supply important information about its handling of the pandemic. The report elaborates on a letter the Senate committee sent to public service agencies in June last year about their refusals to answer questions, and explaining when and how cabinet confidentiality can be justifiably invoked.
An abuse of cabinet confidentiality also jeopardises the legitimacy of that convention, despite the important reasons it came into being.
Agencies must not have paid the letter much attention, because senators have gone to the trouble of writing a report that details a litany of attempts to resist its work holding the government accountable for its pandemic response.
The senators' requests covered such important details as the dates in January 2020 when then-chief medical officer Brendan Murphy provided COVID-19 briefings to the national security committee and the cabinet; modelling related to the JobSeeker payment rate; and the parameters considered by government in the design of JobKeeper.
Ministers invoked cabinet confidentiality in rejecting the requests. The Senate committee said: "If we do not stand up for the Senate's powers and reject this government's secretive agenda designed simply to protect the executive, then the Senate will become a toothless tiger that gets spoon fed only the information that the government wants to feed it."
There was no dissenting report from the committee's Coalition members, except they wrote additional comments acknowledging the large amount of time officials had spent responding to the committee's questions during the inquiry.
Whether it's secrecy, intransigence or a misunderstanding of the conventions, nothing excuses the way government is treating requests for information at a time the public needs confidence in authorities handling COVID-19. An abuse of cabinet confidentiality also jeopardises the legitimacy of that convention, despite the important reasons it came into being.
Sharing a document or information given to cabinet does not inherently reveal anything about the kind of deliberations intended for protection under the confidentiality convention.
Until senators receive full answers to questions about the pandemic response, there's reason to mistrust government motives in hiding information.