Why won’t the Queensland Parliament allow OpenAustralia to publish the Queensland State Parliamentary Hansards?

Open Australia is a volunteer-run website that publishes federal parliamentary Hansards online. The website receives 25,000 page views per month, has slightly over 1300 email subscribers, and is run entirely on open source software.

Similar sites exist for the UK, New Zealand, and even the UN, and while the UK website has had issues with younger, more internet savvy MPs attempting to stack the system to increase their personal coverage, the idea has nevertheless proven to be extremely popular.

While hansards are already available online, the OpenAustralia website organises this information in a far more intuitive way. The website makes it possible for users to search and track their MPs, and also allows them to subscribe to RSS feeds and email alerts of their MPs votes and parliamentary speeches.

In fact, the OpenAustralia has been so successful at collating Hansard information that even public servants are getting on board. Approximately one third of OpenAustralia’s subscribers are public servants with @gov.au email addresses.

One of the best things that Open Oz has done is to publish the Register of Members’ Interests online. The register of interest is a list of gifts received by Australian Senators and representatives, and before OpenAustralia’s intervention, the document was previously available only as a 1500-page handwritten tome.

So what’s going on in Queensland?

Neil Laurie, clerk of the Queensland Parliament says that the issue is “not as simple as would initially appear”. He argues that the Queensland Parliamentary Service posts Hansard online as soon as they can, and that they already make more information available online than any other state or territory government. He notes that Queensland Hansards are already out in the public domain, and says that the Queensland Parliamentary Service simply isn’t prepared to give OpenAustralia “authorised publisher” status.

In an email addressing the issue, Laurie refused the request on the following grounds:

  • I am concerned about the demands that may ultimately be placed upon the Queensland Parliamentary Service by OpenAustralia in terms of supply of information. I am especially concerned that once OpenAustralia is supplied the record for the purposes of republication, it would become a “special stakeholder” over and above our other stakeholders, to the extent that we would have to take into account OpenAustralia’s needs when any adjustments have to be made to our own systems. System redesign is complicated enough, without the added complication of such a “special stakeholder”;
  • Despite OpenAustralia stating that it is a “not for profit volunteer run service”, I am not able to be assured from the information provided that there is no one with some commercial interest (even indirect) or some other private interest in the venture. The information and “special stakeholder” status mentioned above could be a valuable commodity, not currently provided to others;
  • A key issue is whether OpenAustralia should given the status and protection of an “authorised publisher” as an engaged entity for the publication of an authorised parliamentary record as per section 51(4)(g) of the Parliament of Queensland Act 2001. I do not believe it would be appropriate for me to give this authority as this sort of arrangement was not contemplated by the Act;
  • Therefore, if permission was granted, it would be on the basis that OpenAustralia is not an authorised publisher under the Act and that OpenAustralia accepts all risks of any legal liability arising from the further publication of the parliamentary record — which would not be absolutely protected by parliamentary privilege;
  • Most significantly, I am concerned about an alternative “non-official” site upon which lays the Queensland Parliaments official Record of Proceedings but which no one in authority within the Parliamentary Service has control.

Matthew Landauer, from OpenAustralia, acknowledges that “what we’re asking is quite hard”, and recognises that the decision can be a difficult one for public servants to  make. While OpenAustralia has contacted all the state and territory governments about this issue, Queensland has thus far, been the only one to respond.

However, Landauer says that the concerns raised by Laurie are “not very valid”, and are “all concerns that we’ve seen before”.

According to Landauer, OpenAustralia has been publishing federal Hansards for the past six months, and the only extra work that they’ve created for the Federal Parliamentary Service is to help them correct their mistakes. It took OpenAustralia three months (and correspondence with four different government departments) to obtain permission to publish federal Hansards, and Landauer is confident that the states and territories will eventually get on board as well.

Peter Timmins is a privacy and freedom of information consultant who blogs at Open and Shut. He notes that:

More generally, concerns of this kind, flowing from ‘loss of control’ of information and sitting alongside others such as cost recovery and copyright will be a big part of the coming culture debate as FOI reform with a new proactive publishing requirement moves to implementation phase in several jurisdictions. Of course, parliaments everywhere in Australia remain outside the scope of access to government information legislation.

Nevertheless those responsible need to respond to the same contemporary challenges by making information available for use and reuse in a way that suits the needs of citizens. At least the letter from the clerk shows some serious consideration of the issue — I’d be surprised if it has received much attention at state parliaments elsewhere — and Queensland sounds as if it might be a step ahead in publishing online, documents tabled in parliament.

As Senator Faulkner said in his speech to the Australia’s Right to Know conference:

The secrecy of parliamentary proceedings at the birth of the Westminster system is long gone. But the idea that the best way to protect responsible government is by keeping information about that government as confidential as possible has been very slow to die.