Accountability Round Table Executive Membership
The Accountability Round Table is a non-partisan group of citizens with diverse backgrounds (academics, lawyers, politicians, journalists, authors) who are concerned with the current erosion of honesty and integrity in our democracy. The Accountability Round Table is...
Political parties and voter data – what checks and balances?
Ever wondered what political parties do with the data they collect on you? Its amazingly unclear, especially since the Privacy Act does not apply. Equally obscure is how they pay for the software and analysis and what links the software has with other data collection...
‘Guardian’ Transparency Project
The Guardian Australia newspaper has been running a project "The Transparency Project", featuring a group of articles on their Government Accountability investigations over the week 17th to 21st September. They have aggregated them together on one page along with some...
Agencies spend big to block FOI requests
ART's Tim Smith has tirelessly pursued the parlous state of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, where funding has not been reinstated and one Commissioner has been doing the work of three. Tim's letters containing the arguments for refunding and...
Sick Victorian politics – Colleen Lewis
Colleen Lewis, member of Accountability Round Table has been tireless in pursuit of self serving government actions that breach principles of good governance - especially breaches of the principle that public office is a public trust. In this article below she takes...
Public office as/is a public trust – David Solomon
The following paper on concepts of Public Trust, by David Solomon, longstanding member of Accountability Round Table, was given at the Australasian Study of Parliament Group (ASPG) conference held over July 19 and 20th, 2018. David is a former journalist, who after...
New Ministerial Code of Conduct
On Thursday 30th August, the new Prime Minister, Scott Morrison, released a set of Ministerial standards. These may be found at https://www.pmc.gov.au/resource-centre/government/statement-ministerial-standards . We reproduce them here so you can refer to them, and so...
Strengthening integrity assurance for parliament and politics -Ken Coghill
A National Symposium, Australia’s Public Integrity Institutions: Strengths, Weaknesses, Options was held in Canberra on 21 August 2018, auspiced by Griffith University Centre for Governance and Public Policy and Transparency International Its purpose was to identify...
Michael Strong, ex OPI chief tipped for new role.
Former OPI director Michael Strong tipped for watchdog role By Cameron Houston & Ben Preiss From https://www.theage.com.au/national/victoria/former-opi-director-michael-strong-tipped-for-watchdog-role-20180805-p4zvn4.html 5 August 2018 — 5:00pmFormer Office of Police...
The Red Shirts affair proves politicians cannot be trusted – Colleen Lewis
The Red Shirts affair proves politicians cannot be trusted By Colleen Lewis (Member of ART) 4 August 2018 — 11:25pm From https://www.theage.com.au/politics/victoria/the-red-shirts-affair-proves-politicians-cannot-be-trusted-20180803-p4zvbz.html The Victorian...
ASPG Conference 2018 Proceedings
The ASPG Conference held in Brisbane over July 19th to 20th featured many discussions of interest to ART Members. ART members also featured as speakers at several of the sessions. The Proceedings of the 2018 ASPG Conference have been transcribed by Queensland...