A two-year investigation will consider whether cabinet documents in the ACT can be released sooner than under current 10-year secrecy provisions.
Opposition Leader Elizabeth Lee's push to introduce a law to require cabinet documents to be released 30 days after they are considered was defeated in the Legislative Assembly on Thursday afternoon.
Special Minister of State Chris Steel said Ms Lee's bill was concerning and did not acknowledge established cabinet conventions and the need to preserve confidentiality before a final decision is taken.
"An effective cabinet government may consider a range of complex or interlinked policy and investment considerations which require discussions over several months. This type of deliberative and considered decision making is not supported by the bill," Mr Steel said.
The ACT government will instead spend $334,000 over two years on a "policy options investigation" to assess the costs and benefits of contemporaneous release of cabinet information. The funding is included in the 2023-24 territory budget.
"The options investigation will include jurisdictional benchmarking, stakeholder engagement, cost and benefit estimates of delivering a proactive release policy and detailed work that would allow the government to subsequently consider potential implementation of a proactive release policy," Mr Steel said.
Ms Lee had sought to draw comparison to a recommendation in Queensland to adopt a 30-day cabinet document release scheme and to New Zealand, where cabinet documents are released after a month of a decision being taken.
Mr Steel said there were fundamental differences: the Queensland recommendation had been adopted but not yet acted upon while further work was completed to assess how it would work, and the New Zealand system relied on cabinet policy rather than legislation.
The standing Assembly justice and community safety committee recommended against the passage of Ms Lee's bill, which was first released as an exposure draft in May 2022.
"The bill proposed by Ms Lee has a range of fundamental issues that she herself has not been able to address or overcome. She has not provided enough foundation for why her proposal is so needed in the current context of the high level of information that government provides about cabinet decision making. She has not addressed the concerns of the committee," Mr Steel said.
Ms Lee said she was disappointed Labor and the Greens would not support her bill, which would have amended the Freedom of Information Act 2016 to introduce a provision requiring a minister to publish cabinet records except under circumstances that would have allowed the information to remain secret.
The "rotten" government had no intention to seriously improve transparency in the ACT, she said.
"If, as [Labor and the Greens] say, they think that my bill is problematic, I open up an offer right here and right now: come to me with your suggestions about how we can do this. Come to me with suggestions about how we can improve transparency, accountability and ministerial responsibility in this, and I will genuinely work with you to ensure that we get those measures introduced," Ms Lee said.
Chief Minister Andrew Barr, who was absent from the Legislative Assembly on Thursday to attend meetings, has previously said it would be possible to proactively release territory cabinet papers but he could not support a system that forced their release.
"[Ms Lee's proposed laws] would undermine cabinet government. We couldn't support that, but we certainly will be continuing what has been a long trend of providing more information," he said in July 2022.
