FREEDOM OF INFORMATION RETURNS TO CHINA

By Rick Snell[24]

A strange but intriguing phenomenon is occurring in china. A country, long regarded by outsiders as the epitome of a closed, authoritarian and secretive state, has become the scene of a very rapid and extensive uptake of Freedom of Information (FoI) legislation.

This article provides a brief overview of international trends in Freedom of Information and developments within China. These international trends and Chinese reforms further highlight the incapacity of Australian political

and bureaucratic leadership to recognize the necessity in an information age to adopt a more sophisticated and cooperative approach to government information access, disclosure and exchange.

Freedom of Information, in the two decades after the passage of the FoI Act in the United States in 1966, remained a slow-burning law reform issue in global terms. The 1970s saw the adoption of the legislation in a handful

of European countries. In 1983 there was a minor flourish with the adoption of the legislation by Westminster governments-Australia, Canada and New Zealand. Many experts considered that FoI had reached a law reform limit

because it was only being adopted by long established democracies which had well trained public services and, in relative terms, efficient record management systems (Bennett 1997).

Freedom of Information as a precondition for the effective use of government information resources. A linkage that is almost absent in the official discourse about FOI in Australia. In Shanghai some of the driving forces have also included the goal of enhancing the quality of the public service, strengthening governments social management functions .

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