A senior group of Government officials has made a bid to stop clips of Senate hearings from being posted on social media.
The request came from the Secretaries Board, which represents the top public servants from each Government department.
It says footage posted without full context exposes officials to “ridicule, hostility or abuse”.
Critics say the change would let parliamentarians avoid public scrutiny.
Here’s what you need to know.
Secretaries
Every major federal department is run day to day by a senior bureaucrat called a “secretary”.
Secretaries manage the department, while Government Ministers are elected officials who publicly announce policy and answer to voters.
These secretaries are part of a board, chaired by Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Steven Kennedy (pictured above).
Background
Senate hearings are public meetings where a group of senators questions people about a particular issue.
They can be called to review a bill, or Government spending (known as Budget Estimates).
Your contribution ensures The Daily Aus can continue doing the work you love.
I want to give $10 monthly to help TDA keep doing the news.
Your details:
During a Senate hearing last week, Defence deputy secretary Celia Perkins said the department’s witnesses “do not consent to the reposting of our evidence to social media sites”.
The committee overruled Perkins, with Greens Senator David Shoebridge saying department officials “do not get to censor what the Australian public sees”.
This week, the Secretaries Board submitted a similar ask to the Joint Committee on Parliamentary Standards.
They requested it “consider options to prevent the potentially harmful use of committee evidence on social media.”
The group argued officials haven’t consented to their evidence being used this way, since it was given for the purposes of the hearing, not for political parties to share online.
If Parliament won’t go that far, they said the fallback should be requiring excerpts to be posted in full, with no editing, no added captions, and comments switched off wherever officials’ evidence appears.
“The use of officials’ likenesses and their evidence in this way has the potential to be harmful both to the individual and the public sector as a whole," the Secretaries Board said in their submission to The Joint Committee on Parliamentary Standards.
Response
Opposition defence spokesman James Paterson told TDA that “seeking to restrict the use of that footage would be an extraordinary overreach in a parliamentary democracy”.
Greens Senator Steph Hodgins-May said: “Bureaucrats shouldn’t get to decide where to draw the line on parliamentary scrutiny, particularly when they’re the ones being scrutinised.”
The submission is one of many recommendations before the standards committee’s ongoing inquiry.
No decision has been made yet.
