depa appeals NCAT decision supporting unnecessary and unacceptable OLG confidentiality

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Published: Wednesday, 22 June 2022 12:46

There’s no point having a GIPA Act, which when it was made was proudly claimed by the NSW Premier at the time, Nathan Reese, to set a new standard in allowing access to government information, if it doesn’t do so. Neither does it make any sense having an Information Commissioner more interested in the denial of information, than providing access to it. Nathan would be very disappointed.

NCAT found against us when we wanted access to documents within OLG which would explain how their CEO at the time could have made such a fundamental mistake in an order that the councillor concerned had no priors, nor any subsequent complaints in the pipeline. Both those statements were wrong.

How the investigation was conducted, by whom, or who was interviewed was not the purpose of our application. The application was not pursuing information which is locked away by exclusions to the GIPA Act that would make any totalitarian regime green with envy, but how the CEO could have considered an informed report from the investigators and still have got it factually wrong.

We hope for greater success with the appeal but in an environment where the Minister for Local Government has appointed an independent reviewer to review the framework of councillor complaints, and how they’re handled by OLG, including the embarrassing and astonishingly slow timeframes, it doesn’t hurt to keep reminding people about the failures of the current system.