HON ALISON XAMON (North Metropolitan) [ 6.28 pm ]: On the eve of the budget being announced, I want to make some comments about the importance of ensuring that we maintain a strong and independent State Records Office. State records are effectively the memory of our government. It is not only an archive of our heritage, but also, most importantly, a way of ensuring government accountability. For members’ information, the need for an independent state archives entity was originally identified in the 1992 WA Inc royal commission. The royal commission identified two fundamental principles that needed to be upheld by government — democracy and trust. The commission identified that accurate records are an essential prerequisite to ensuring accountability. One of the essential tasks of the 1995 Commission on Government was how to set up this independent office. The Commission on Government identified record management — creation, maintenance and retention — as a key matter for the new body and for legislation to address. As a result, the State Records Act 2000, the State Records Commission and the State Records Office were developed based on the Commission on Government recommendations arising from the WA Inc royal commission. That raises the question of what it was meant to look like. The royal commission said that the legislation enabling the independent archives office should, at a minimum, define what a public record is, ensure the public ownership of public records, require the archives authority to set standards in record creation and their maintenance and retention, empower the authority to inspect the records of every agency for the purpose of monitoring compliance with those standards, establish disciplinary offences for officials who fail to comply, and establish a consultative process bet ween the authority, the Auditor General, the Ombudsman, a representative of the Supreme Court and the Information Commissioner. The Commission on Government’s report outlined the way in which the State Records Office should be set up. It stated that it required a commissioner as the head of the organisation who receives public records into their custody and reports directly to Parliament. It also stated that it should be staffed by public servants and be the responsibility of the Minister for Public Sector Management. Importantly, it also said that the office should be funded sufficiently to perform the functions required of it by the act and by the people of WA.
I turn the attention of members to what it looks like at the moment. It looks like an office that has been starved of the funds and support it needs to do this very important job around government accountability. From the 2015 – 16 State Records Commission annual report, I have a list of a few of the issues that the office is struggling with as it tries to ensure that our important state records are created, maintained and appropriately archived. It identified that it was unable to implement compliance monitoring, it was unable to meet all requests for provision of records training, and it was unable to accept approximately six million documents from state government agencies. In fact, agencies have not been able to transfer hard copy archives to the State Records Office since 2001 — basically, never during the existence of the State Records Office. That makes the archives really difficult for members of the public to access. This week I heard a man on the radio say that he has been trying to access records for the purpose of redress, talking about how difficult this process has been for him personally. No conservation services are available to support the ongoing protection of fragile items and there is a lack of a digital archive to hold “born digital” records. Fewer than half of the surveyed government agencies are confident that they will be able to transfer digital records if and when a digital archive is created. Of the surveyed government agencies, 38 per cent were not confident that they will be able to access all their digital records for the required retention period. We should be really concerned about this; this is a problem. We need to have these documents and ensure that they can be accessed. It is a fundamental part of ensuring that we maintain the integrity of government. A business case for archive space was developed in 2009 – 10 and $100 000 was allocated the following year for State Records Office repository site planning but we have not heard anything about that since then. The State Records Office, as an independent office, disappeared from the budget in a transparent way from 2013 – 14. Most tellingly, in July this year, the State Records Office was labelled as a source of unnecessary internal red tape rather than the essential role of state records in accountability and good governance being understood. These are really important issues, and we need to be careful not to try to dodge accountability like this.
I suggest to members that it is not a particularly well known or well understood issue, but we should not take state records so lightly. We need to ensure that the State Records Office receives appropriate funds and that we are not shirking our responsibilities under the legislation, which was designed to make sure that we will not have the sort of chaos we had under WA Inc. We should remember that these records are very important to help people deal with the consequences of government decisions on their lives. These are the sorts of records that were made available to the stolen generation, for example. People need to feel confident that they will be able to get those records at some point in the future.
Instead of being part of the Department of Culture and the Arts, it will go back to being part of WA’s library and information services while still reporting to be State Records Commission on matters relating to the act. We are told that this is to try to centralise back office functions, but I thought these functions were already centralised by the 20-odd State Records Office staff as part of the Department of Culture and the Arts. It raises the question of what will be gained by this change — I started to outline what will be lost. At best, we are simply looking at a letterhead change for the sake of it. At worst, I have had concerns raised with me that it will make an already difficult financial situation worse for the State Records Office, which will continue to compete for a shrinking pool of funds. We have already seen how badly the lack of funding is impacting on this very important body for government accountability.
I acknowledge the fantastic work that the State Records Office has been doing, despite the lack of support it has received from successive governments. We were the first state in Australia to implement five-yearly record - keeping plans, to develop online retention and disposal schedules, to implement access to memory archives catalogue software and a range of other really good and important things it has done. I absolutely want to acknowledge the good work being done by those diligent public servants. The reality is that we need more of this activity, not less. We need to ensure that the State Records Office has more capacity to execute the decisions of the State Records Commission, not less. Although I recognise the obvious synergies with the State Library of Western Australia and the Museum, the State Records Office has the additional burden of being responsible for the cross-agency implementation of the State Records Act, which is a huge job. We should look very closely at the amount of space and funding that the State Records Office gets so it can protect, preserve and make available to the public our state archives, including the “born digital” records, which will only increase in size. I would like to see the importance of its work reflected. I would also like to see some kind of functional review, stakeholder engagement and proper planning around all the machinery-of-government changes. I particularly draw this government’s attention to the need to have much broader consultation about changes to the State Records Office. People expect our government to be transparent. We need to have accountability in government and to learn from the lessons of the past and do better.