[LINK] Broadband for a Broad Land

[Tom Worthington]

I wrote:

> I started writing a submission for the NBN Inquiry ...

I sent my submission to the NBN inquiry on Monday, along the lines of my 
Blog posting:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2011/02/broadband-for-broad-land-envrionment.html>.

However, the Inquiry Secretary for the House of Representatives Standing
Committee on Infrastructure and Communications has replied asking to
remove the draft from the web, saying that "... a submission has been
sent to a committee it is not supposed to be published or disclosed
until it has been considered by the committee. ...".

This issue came up more than ten years ago when I was preparing 
submissions to Senate committees on behalf of the Australian Computer 
Society. For those inquiries I developed the technique of placing the 
drat submission online so as to have maximum consultation with members 
and other bodies. So as not to breech committee rules, I marked these 
documents "Draft", to distinguish them from the actual final submission 
made. I had no concerns expressed by the committee secretariats with 
this practice. Like the process of making submissions in electronic 
format (the precedent for which was set by an ACS submission), I had 
assumed this was now accepted practice for parliamentary inquiries.

If I am required to obtain permission from a parliamentary committee 
before discussing a topic with anyone, it will make preparation of any 
submission very difficult.

I an not a lawyer, but my understating is that my right to discuss any 
issues I wish, with whom ever I wish, is a fundamental one, as 
recognised by the High Court of Australia. Therefore a rule by a 
parliamentary committee requiring me to seek their prior permission is 
invalid.

Any suggestions on how to respond to the committee's request would be 
welcome.


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra