Labor continues chase for leaked Hydro maintenance report

The Mercury‎‎‎: Tasmania: Saturday, October 01, 2016.

THE State Opposition will appeal to Tasmania’s Ombudsman in a further effort to get Hydro Tasmania to publicly release a leaked internal maintenance report.

Hydro Tasmania and the State Government have resisted calls for the full release of a leaked internal report, published by the Mercury, which says the business will struggle to maintain the state’s hydro-electricity network over the next decade under its existing maintenance budget.

Labor lodged a Right to Information request for Hydro Tasmania’s 10-year asset management plan 2016 and was supplied with a redacted version.

Opposition spokeswoman on open government Madeleine Ogilvie.

Sections of paragraphs, sentences and even single words were whited-out throughout the 50-page document.

University of Tasmania RTI export Rick Snell this week said many parts of the report provided to Labor appeared to have been redacted simply to avoid further embarrassment.

Associate Professor Snell said the response probably fell short of the requirements of the RTI Act and the Ombudsman’s RTI manual.

He also said it was unusual to see individual words and parts of phrases removed from documents.

The Opposition spokeswoman on open government, Madeleine Ogilvie, said Labor would start an appeal process over the “heavily redacted” report.

“It seems absurd to us that a document that has already made its way into the public domain would be so comprehensively censored,” Ms Ogilvie said.

“I note the comments of UTAS RTI expert Rick Snell echo ours when it comes to the redactions being based on political, not commercial reasons. As Professor Snell says, that means the redactions fall outside the RTI Act.

“The Liberal Government should end this farce and publicly release the entire report. This saga is typical of this Government’s approach to the whole RTI system.”

Hydro Tasmania chief executive Stephen Davy has defended the version of the report supplied to Labor, saying information was redacted for commercial and operational reasons.

Hydro chief operating officer Evangelista Albertini has downplayed the report’s significance, describing it as a routine planning document.