STATE RECORDS

Mr MARSHALL (Norwood—Leader of the Opposition) (14:51): Supplementary: is the Attorney-General saying that the initial email is a state official record, but that any forwarded copy does not constitute an official state record? How do you determine what is a state record and what is not a state record?

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (14:51): Again, these are actually very good questions from the leader, because they underscore the point. When he says 'the email' and 'the second email', I assume he is referring back to our friendly conversation about Mr Debelle. The situation is this, and can I just explain it this way: each document is assessed in its own context and on its own face as being either a state record or not—point No. 1. Point No. 2 is that the State Records Act does not require multiple collection of the same material.

So, for example, if five agencies have a copy of document A, it is not required under the State Records Act that five versions of document A are reposed in the state records. It is only required that that record, being document A, is retained somewhere. If we are dealing with, for example, an email, and if the email has, as we are talking about here, a heading which indicates that it is of some significance, we know that in fact that email was retained. We know that for sure, because we have been hearing about it since about October last year. So, we know that. If that email was forwarded on to a third party and the—

Mr Marshall interjecting:

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Pardon?

Mr Marshall: We know that.

The Hon. J.R. RAU: Yes. That email is forwarded on to a third party. Now, it could be forwarded on to a third party in a way where the person with the email in their machine goes into Outlook and presses a button called 'Forward' and then a little thing pops up and they go to their address book, they put in 'Mr Speaker' and they hit 'send'. In that hypothetical, the only thing that has happened to the original document is that, above the top line somewhere, there is a thing that says, 'Forwarded by Bloggs'.

On the other hand, it is possible that a document might be obtained and a commentary on the document, some other comment about the document or some additional document is added to that document, and then that completely different document be then forwarded on somewhere else. Now that is obviously a different situation to the first situation that I have tried to describe.

The point is that the analysis of those two documents from the perspective of whether they are State Records should logically produce a different answer. Because we haven't seen the document or the heading or whatever of that document, it is impossible for me, or the Leader of the Opposition or anyone else to classify that document with any certainty. What we can say is we do know what the primary document was, because we have all had it since October or thereabouts of last year.