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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, Second Session (52-2)
2013-09-11 Daily Xml
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STATE RECORDS

Mr MARSHALL (Norwood—Leader of the Opposition) (14:28): As a supplementary to that, can the Attorney-General provide the terms of reference and the powers of the Moss review to the parliament?

The Hon. J.R. RAU (Enfield—Deputy Premier, Attorney-General, Minister for Planning, Minister for Industrial Relations, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (14:28): Yes; certainly. I am able to finish my last answer a bit now too, actually. Between 2009 and 2012, I was advised that the volume of email traffic—this is only email traffic; we are not talking here about text messages and other things which create a whole world of other complications—coming into government from outside is up by 500 per cent. The amount of internal increase in traffic in those three years is 1,000 per cent. I have also been told that 98 per cent of the data stored in the world today was created in the last two years; so that gives some idea of the scale and complexity of the issues that we are confronting. I was asked about Mr Moss.

I can inform the parliament that Mr Moss is being asked—and I will not go through the preamble because that is probably not relevant—to do the following: to inquire into the extent to which electronic communication is used as a means of creating, storing and transferring official records; secondly, the extent to which there has been an increase in the volume of official records created by government agencies due to increasing reliance on technology and electronic communications; thirdly, how other jurisdictions have attempted to address these issues and their degree of success; and fourthly, report on whether the existing legislative framework is appropriately managed or realistically capable of being so managed, including an examination of the destruction and retention regimes including efficient official record retention where necessary, and the extent to which the existing framework would be assisted or enhanced by a change in the culture of government agencies and current state records management practices and any legislative drivers required to achieve the same.

I indicate to the parliament today, as I indicated in our communication this morning, I have actually said to the Leader of the Opposition that I am very happy for the leader and any member of the leader's team that he wishes to nominate to do it, to be able to sit down with Mr Moss and express any particular concerns they have so that he can take those into account.

Mr Marshall: When will he report?

The Hon. J.R. RAU: When will he report? I can indicate that I would like Mr Moss to report as soon as possible, but I have deliberately not put some artificial time constraint on Mr Moss because this is a serious issue and I am not interested in having a bit of a spit and polish job done over this so that we can just say, 'We've looked at it and we've fixed it.' This is about getting it right and it is about doing it properly, so I hope he gets on with it—well, I know Mr Moss will get on with it—but I hope he is able to master all of the material quickly, and I hope that he is able to form opinions quickly, but I would rather he does it properly so that we are all better off rather than me putting some artificial time constraint on Mr Moss and him doing a job that is less than we deserve.

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