Loosen ICAC secrecy, commissioner tells AG
The state’s ICAC boss has written to Attorney-General John Rau recommending that the secrecy provisions of the ICAC legislation be loosened.
Commissioner Bruce Lander told InDaily he had written to Rau over the past week to suggest amendments to free up agencies from the secrecy provisions in the Act, which he said were too tight.
“At the moment the Act is so tight that I don’t think that people within an organisation can have a conversation about a report to the Office of Public Integrity,” he said. “That’s entirely inappropriate…”
He added that “some people outside the agency might need to know as well”.
The legislation prevents anyone from publishing information “that identifies or tends to identify” a person about whom a complaint has been made, or information that might tend to identify a person.
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In practice, Lander said this meant people within public agencies were prevented from having appropriate discussions about matters that had been, or should be, referred to the OPI.
“I have written to the Attorney-General about it and I expect the Government would support some amendments to the Act,” he said.
Lander has had concerns about the restrictive nature of the Act since the early days of his time in the position last year.
InDaily reported in November that he had encountered some problems.
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Speaking hypothetically, he said the CEO of an organisation that referred a well-known allegation of corruption to the ICAC would be prevented by the Act from telling his or her employees.
Lander said this could reduce confidence in the CEO and he had been granting authority, in individual cases, for agency leaders to be able to reveal this information to employees.
However, Lander said today that while he wanted to free up appropriate communication within agencies, he had no plans to recommend any adjustment to restrictions on the media’s reporting of ICAC matters.
“If I made that recommendation, you would have to rewrite the entire Act, because it’s predicated on preventing reputational damage,” he said. “It would be a substantial change of policy”, which he said was a matter for Government.
Attorney-General John Rau told InDaily he had not yet seen Lander’s letter, but he had always been open to the idea that the legislation might need “minor tweaks”.
“If the thing is so tight that he’s running into really frequent minor administrative hurdles that could be managed better at a conceptual level, I don’t have any problem with dealing with that,” he said.
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