COMMUNITIES — POLICE RAID
121. Ms M.J. DAVIES to the Minister for Child Protection:
I have a supplementary question.
When can we expect to receive that information?
Ms S.F.
McGURK replied:
I am happy to provide that
information by tomorrow. I do not think there is anything particularly
controversial. As I said, I have given most of those dates. I do not know exactly
what the opposition is getting at—as if there is some mystery here
about when we were told about possible breaches, the unauthorised access of
information and the removal of a large number of documents from the Department
of Communities, and that some of those documents contained sensitive
information. I really wish the opposition was more concerned about the fact
that a large number of documents, including documents containing details of
children in care, might have been compromised. I wish you would show some
concern about that, but that seems to be something that is only of passing
interest, because what you are really interested in, in this regard, is some
sort of political advantage over this incident. What was made clear yesterday
by me and, I think, rather clearly by the Minister for Police, was that as
well-meaning as an individual employee might be in taking it upon themselves to
take information from a government department, they are not authorised to do
that.
There
are in fact other mechanisms available to people who have concerns about the
way that government departments are conducting their business, so-called
whistleblower provisions, in the Public Interest Disclosure Act. There are
specific laws and powers to enable individual employees to take information
forward with anonymity and with some regard for their protection. It is not the
case that this was the only opportunity an employee had to disclose issues that
they were concerned about. That person may have been concerned about what was going
on in the department; I do not know. I do not know what their motivation was.
But it was not right for them to remove large amounts of information, including
details of children in care and the foster carer organisations that look after
them. It is just not right.
Everything I have been advised, from the beginning of this
process, is that the Department of Communities—particularly the
director general, but also the integrity unit—acted correctly in what
it did when it found out that that was the
case. It advised the Public Sector Commission and the Corruption and Crime
Commission and, because it thought there may have been criminal
offences, it advised the police. The police then took that investigation
themselves and conducted the investigation in the way they saw fit. In fact,
again, if people had been listening carefully to what the Minister for Police
said yesterday, he made it very clear in the briefing that he received from the police that they did believe there was a prima
facie case for a possible criminal charge in one of those documents that
was leaked and the nature of the attachments. However, they decided that it was
not in the public interest for that person to be prosecuted. That was a police
decision. There is nothing untoward, as I understand it. Nothing I have heard
in any of the public discussion, or certainly in this Parliament, leads me to
question the way that the Department of Communities or myself or any of my
other ministerial colleagues have acted in this incident.