Thank you, Mr. Chairman. I have listened with interest to the flow of this discussion, and it reminds me of so many other ones where we deal with a bill where there is hidden reluctance. The reluctance surfaces when you hear all the principles being espoused of what a good idea this is and so on, however, the cost is the problem. The new bogeyman, if you like, is the cost now. There is nothing in the act that talks about costs. It talks about the principle of governments that are in the business of creating records. That's what they do all the time. They are always putting stuff onto paper. So what is the big deal about making a piece of paper that you have created available to somebody else? How much work is involved in that? It seems to me that the simplest act in the whole bureaucracy is to make something available that you have already committed to a piece of paper, because that's what this act is all about.
So I agree with those comments that have been made that really, you don't need a complex system to deal with providing information that you already have. The big problem with our government may be finding it because we don't have a proper records management system, in my opinion. It's improving, but for 10 years they have struggled with the problem of how you organize your records so that you can get access to them. That may be a problem that is the hidden one that hasn't really come out in this discussion and in this debate.
However, if you really want to do something, if you are really keen to do something and you want to do it efficiently and within budget and so on, there are ways of doing this. One of them would be fee for service. If the government is open and provides information as it's asked for, this guy is going to be out of work with nothing to do. If you just simply say, there's not a problem if you want to know what we are doing about this or about that, this Commissioner would be virtually unemployed. It would be just a title, and you would give him a dollar a year for the title, but you can find that out after you have worked with it for a year or two to see how much work is generated because of the reluctance of government to provide the information that the people have paid for anyway. It's their information. They paid for this. It's their government.
So, it seems to me that problems have been created where perhaps none exist. I wouldn't want us to get bogged down into the argument about the tremendous cost of setting up this office. I would remind Members that it was an Ordinary Member, a private Member, who tried to introduce it into the House in the last Assembly, and it was the government itself that didn't want that to happen and decided to take ownership of the process because they didn't want to trust Ordinary Members to do it in a way that maybe would make the government too uncomfortable. So, it's been an on-going issue. And, in my view, having looked at this act carefully, I don't understand what anyone is afraid of.
I had experience in the last Assembly, Mr. Chairman, of working on what was, at that time, during the four years I was a Member of the 11th Assembly on environmental issues. Eventually we got an Environmental Rights Act, because, if you look at Hansard, during the last Assembly environment came up all the time. In every session it was the major issue that came up. I won't go through the long list of those issues that were raised, but it was, believe me, a major issue.
Since the Environmental Rights Act has been passed, and there was tremendous controversy among the mining people about all the damage it is going to do, all the hurt and how it was going to drive investment away. We were lambasted right across the country in the Northern Miner. All the mining people saw this as a terrible thing that we were doing. That bill has been used three times, I believe. There is no huge bureaucracy. There may have been some costs in asking people to do jobs that they are hired in our government to do anyway. We have experts that do this kind of work. That is the kind of work they do. So I don't see that that act cost this government anything, despite all the terrible predictions about the damage it would do and the tremendous costs it would cause our industry and our economy and everything else.
I believe that this act is a very straightforward act, and I fail to comprehend how simply providing a record to somebody else that we already have is going to cost $1 million. It makes no sense to me. I would like to have the government reconsider this reluctance based upon costs, because it seems to me that there's been some subtle persuasion going on here to try to get this bill maybe revamped or reworked or delayed, or whatever you want to call it, on the basis of the terrible financial position that we are in, and that argument could then be used by Members to convince their constituents that that's the real reason why.
I really want to support it, but I am convinced that we are in such terrible shape, we can't afford this luxury. So I would urge Members to think carefully about this one. I don't see this as having the huge impact that people really believe it is going to have because if we as an open government are doing our job, this guy won't have much to do.