I can see clearly now

Remember the brouhaha over the Sydney tunnel and other PPP contracts? (http://guambatstew.blogspot.com/2005/10/tunnel-vision.html) Well, the veil is about to be lifted. Funny, what was a day ago commercial-in-confidence and cabinet privilege is now something we should all be entitled to see. What changed? Not to look the gift-horse in the mouth, just to try to figure out if that can be done more often on other issues, like so-called terror laws, maybe.

The SMH reports:
"After weeks of public anger the NSW Government has agreed to release Cross City Tunnel papers it said it could never make public because they were commercial-in-confidence. The documents will be tabled in Parliament, opening the way for more details of the tunnel deal's financial and management arrangements to be made public. The Government's about-turn followed sustained public criticism, two motions from the Greens and a decision by the Opposition Leader, Peter Debnam, to ditch his party's support for keeping government contracts secret.

"However, a spokesman for the Premier, Morris Iemma, said the Government had "from day one" been willing to make as many documents public as possible without exposing taxpayers to liability from the tunnel's owners. The documents should be available from tomorrow.

"Mr Debnam said any government he led would publicise all contracts with the private sector as a matter of course. "I think we should establish a position where people know, when they start negotiating with government, the whole bloody thing is going to be public," he said.

"The Greens obtained some Cross City Tunnel papers in 2003 but many of the crucial documents making sense of the deal were withheld because the Government claimed privilege.

"Mr Debnam said yesterday ... "We are saying it has reached the point now where public confidence needs to be lifted and trust needs to be re-established," he said. "We wanted to make a new starting point for this new century so that anyone doing business with the Government should work on the basis it [a future contract] will be public. I just don't see any difficulty with it, except we haven't done it before and people are saying it will give you indigestion or something." The only exceptions might be when there was a genuine commercial reason for keeping a sensitive piece of information out of the public arena, but such a decision should be made by the independent Auditor-General and not by the Government.

"The chief executive of Australian Business Limited, Mark Bethwaite, applauded moves to make the contracts public and said there was "public and commercial benefit from greater transparency in contracts between the public and private sectors". "Contracts such as the Cross City Tunnel should be on the public record," he said."
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