Download Word

House of Representatives                                Ch 18                                                 p 648

Statutory secrecy provisions

A number of provisions in Commonwealth Acts prohibit the disclosure of certain information and create criminal offences for disclosure in contravention of the provisions. Examples are to be found in the Income Tax Assessment Act and the Family Law Act. The application of such provisions could become an issue in respect of either House directly, but is more likely to arise in respect of committee inquiries, and did so in 1990 and 1991. Different views were expressed as to whether such provisions prevented the provision of such information to a committee, but in August 1991 the Solicitor-General advised as follows:

Although express words are not required, a sufficiently clear intention that the provision is a declaration under section 49 must be discernible. Accordingly, a general and almost unqualified prohibition on disclosure is, in my view, insufficient to embrace disclosure to Committees. The nature of section 49 requires something more specific. ¹

(The advice went on to state that certain provisions in the National Crime Authority Act which limited activities of the Joint Committee on the National Crime Authority were sufficient to fetter the otherwise wide powers of the committee.)

It is also to be noted that should information prohib ited from disclosure under a general secrecy provision be disclosed in a submission received by a committee or in oral evidence to a committee, the law of parliamentary privilege would prevent any action or prosecution because the disclosure would have occurred as part of ‘proceedings in Parliament’. ²

Opinion of Solicitor-General Griffith, 12 August 1991. This view was consistent with a joint opinion given in 1985 by the Attorney-General and the Solicitor-General, although in 1990 differing views were put forward by officers of the Attorney-General’s Department. In a 1984 report the House of Lords Committee of Privileges published an opinion by three Law Lords to the effect that general legislative provisions override previously existing parliamentary privileges (HL 254 (1984) ). And see Odgers , 11th edn, pp. 49-53 and Geoffrey Lindell, ‘Parliamentary inquiries and government witnesses’, Melbourne University Law Review , vol. 20, 1995, pp. 408-9.

Parliamentary Privileges Act 1987 , s. 16.