Public servants should drop their "visceral fear" about freedom of information rules and shed their complacency about the importance of releasing documents to the public, the boss of the national archives says.
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National Archives of Australia director-general David Fricker on Wednesday also defended his agency's fight against the release of documents, such as the palace letters related to the Whitlam dismissal, saying its spending on that case was the "price of justice".
Mr Fricker, speaking at the National Press Club, said he had tried to discourage negative attitudes towards freedom of information within the public service and had defended its value for helping the nation prepare against future pandemics.
"This is history that Australia needs to remember, we need to learn from this, because there will be another pandemic," he said.
"I do think there's a bit of complacency about the importance, the long-term value of the work we do within the agencies of government, the knowledge and learning for this nation, as opposed to being frightened that this email will somehow embarrass me."
His comments follow mounting delays and chronic backlogs of reviews for freedom of information requests in Commonwealth agencies, while funding for the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner remained static.
Mr Fricker on Wednesday said despite their "visceral fear" of FOI, public servants should not feel like they had something to hide.
"If public servants are working professionally, if they're working ethically, if they're doing the job they've been told to do by the government, by law, then we should be proud of the work we've done, and public servants in the Commonwealth really accept the idea that we are every day making history as well," he said.
"We're not only just delivering on functions and delivering services, like right now in the Covid pandemic, across government we're not only working flat out to do the government response, we're making history."
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Mr Fricker defended the legal controls over the archives' release of documents, saying they were needed to prevent damage to national security or relationships with other nations.
But he urged reform to the Archives Act that would make the law easier for the public to understand, rather than providing the agency more freedom to release documents.
"I just want to have a clearer statement of the intent of the Parliament ultimately, on what should be made public and what should be [unreleased] and why, and for that to be clearly articulated."
Mr Fricker suggested the legal status of the palace letters should not have taken so long to settle. Federal agencies spent more than $1 million in legal fees on a losing bid to keep the correspondence between former governor-general Sir John Kerr and the Queen a secret.
"Surely something like that could have been resolved in five minutes, but it wasn't," he said.
"Why did the judges of the Federal Court and High Court disagree with each other over something which should be a simple binary reading of a line of legislation? But it isn't."
The laws also needed reform in response to the emergence of encrypted messaging, which ministerial offices and public servants were using to communicate. Encrypted messages are not covered by laws requiring bureaucrats to keep records of Commonwealth documents.
"We do need to modernise legislation, because if we're going to efficiently capture the evidence of government activity, we need to have legislation that properly embraces those non-government platforms," Mr Fricker said.
The National Archives boss said the $68 million in government funding announced last month to help save records at risk of deterioration had removed much of the "Sophie's choice" situation requiring it to abandon the digitisation of documents in favour of other records.
In cases where it had to choose between at-risk records, the archives would prioritise documents according to their significance and whether they uniquely documented aspects of Australian life, he said.
Mr Fricker also said that despite the growth of digitisation, the archives would not close any of its offices around the nation.
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