faulker03

Attorney General Mark Speakman has announced the proposed appointment of Samantha Gavel as NSW Privacy Commissioner. T he Joint Parliamentary Committee on the Ombudsman, the Law Enforcement Conduct Commission and the Crime Commission gets  to confirm the appointment... or otherwise. And the good news, many years late, is that the government will make the position full time.  The Commissioner has  been part-time since the first appointment in 1999  and for long periods there was an Acting Commissioner, including 2003-07 and 2009-2011.  “Ms Gavel is a leader in privacy protection who is currently the National Health Practitioner Ombudsman and Privacy Commissioner, and was previously the Private Health Insurance Ombudsman for six years,” Mr Speakman said in a Media release  Paris Cowan in IT News in February recounted how privacy regulation everywhere around the country is under resourced. Budgeted expenditure for the Information and Privacy Commission in 201...

 Professor David Ben-Tovim , Flinders University The recent jailing of British breast surgeon Ian Paterson after performing multiple unnecessary operations has highlighted the issue of hospital safety. Paterson’s unnecessary surgeries included some performed in private hospitals, which prompted UK doctors to call for private hospitals to report similar patient safety data as public hospitals, including unexpected deaths and serious injuries. This example shows how little we know about patient safety and quality in our private hospitals, not only in the UK, but also in Australia. What do we know about hospital safety and quality? In Australia, one of the best places to look for information on hospital safety and quality is the MyHospitals website, a commonwealth department site run by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare . The Australian Institute of Health and Welfare is provided with data about every patient treated in an Australian hospital, both public and p...

Media Release  APC 19 May 2017. "The Australian Press Council has awarded its Press Freedom Medal to two outstanding individuals for their major contributions to ensuring a free and open society: Peter Timmins - Australian Open Government Partnership Network and Michael Cameron - News Corp Australia. The 2017 Press Freedom Medals were awarded at a special ceremony in Sydney on 19 May. As well as members of the Press Council, journalists and guests from a variety of organisations attended. Peter Timmins is a well-known advocate of improved standards of transparency and accountability and Australia's leading expert on Freedom of Information (FOI) policy and privacy, as well as being a leader of the Australian Open Government Partnership Network and publisher of the Open and Shut blog. Michael Cameron is the National Editorial Counsel for News Corp Australia. He leads an in-house legal team, which he established, whose members have appeared in dozens of matters involving challen...

Vale Mark Colvin, a great sense of sadness at his death. I met him once. when he looked like this. In the 1980s he interviewed me for a Four Corners program on the Freedom of Information Act, whether it was working or not. All the footage of that interview ended up on the cutting room floor. I never held it against him. Probably great editorial judgment about what to leave out of the program that went to air! But what a wonderful companion by remote for years particularly for the last 20 at 6pm during dinner preparation.

The appropriation for the Office of Australian Information Commissioner in the 2017-18 Budget is $10.368 million, down from $10.618 million . ( A n 'efficiency dividend' counts fo r a reduction of $160,000.) Total funds available in 2017-18 (counting funding available from previous years and other revenue): $19.345 million compared to $19.045 million in 2016-17.  The average staffing level, 75 is unchanged. In the three 'out y ears' appropriations drop to $10.265 million, $8.999 million and $9.042 million. For outcomes measurement purposes t he office functions are lumped together in  a single o utcome in the Portfolio Budget Statement with budgeted expenses at $14.4 million ($14.988 million in the current year) for "Provision of public access to Commonwealth Government information, protection of individuals’ personal information, and performance of information commissioner, freedom of information and privacy functions." The office has extra re...

The Transparency International Australia National Integrity 2017 conference in Brisbane last week brought together 160 government, business and civil society delegates from all corners of Australia, including senior legal figures, heads of integrity agencies, federal, state and local parliamentarians, community groups, corporate leaders and individual TI Australia members. Lots of energy at the conference and a perceptible whiff that positive change is in the air with more voices calling for improvements in integrity in the public and corporate sectors. The release of a major paper canvassing key issues for the design of a federal anti-corruption commission was one of many highlights. Here's me giving a rundown on lessons learned from Australia's experience in developing the national action plan required as a result of the commitment by PM Turnbull in December 2015 to join the Open Government Partnership. Someone told me the only thing missing from the timeline diagram ar...

 Crikey this morning "A monumental waste of everyone's time." That's how shadow attorney-general Mark Dreyfus has described the three-year battle to release Attorney General George Brandis' diary for the months leading up to the 2014 budget. Brandis has finally released a heavily redacted version of his diary, after challenging Dreyfus' freedom of information request all the way to the Federal Court, which ordered Brandis to hand over the diary in September. So what does it show? The 34-page printout of his Outlook calendar doesn't include any meetings with community legal centres, which had their funding slashed in the 2014 budget. The Attorney-General's office says this isn't the whole story though, as the diary doesn't show meetings made at short notice or by the Attorney-General himself. The only correction to this and Adam Gartrell's longer piece in the Sydney Morning Herald is that the Federal Court ruled there was no valid reason f...