Routine corruption within the Senate Inquiry process

[gitcnd]

All submissions that could embarrass government are hidden ("Deemed confidential"), and (vastly more alarmingly) all records of such submissions are erased (to cover up how many submissions they cover up). This has occurred to all my submissions to every inquiry I've "participated" in (more than 3).

From watching the inquiry's broadcast, it was clear that my submission was never read (evidence I supplied was never used to contradict false answers they got during questioning - all of which they accepted, no matter how obviously misleading or evasive they were). I contacted the senators involved, none of whom were able to confirm ever getting my submission.

We are also threatened with prosecution and "disadvantage" if we let anyone see our submissions: https://chrisdrake.com/for_gai/Veiled_prosecution_threat_for_unauthorised_disclosure.png (and the "deemed confidential" submission that related to: https://chrisdrake.com/for_gai/Digital_delivery_of_Government_services_Inquiry_Submission_2017.pdf )

[mdavis-xyz]

It sounds reasonable that a submitter may request that their submission be confidential in this way, but not by default. Is there some kind of option in the submission process to request confidentiality? Is that an optional non-default thing that could be requested?

Could we apply Hanlon's Razor and say that maybe they just stuffed up and applied this setting by mistake?

Given that this happened 3 times, probably not. I'll add it to my list.

[gitcnd]

You missed my point. Yes, they (not me) "deemed my submission confidential", but what goes along with their action is that they DESTROY ALL RECORDS OF THE SUBMISSION EVER BEING FILED AT ALL (this last act is worse than the original corruption of suppressing the submission).

All the inquiries I've submitted to have a website showing the submissions they get, and letting you download and read them - which gives everyone a totally one-sided false-impression picture: not only is everything that the government found "embarrassing" removed form that list (so we don't know it was ever submitted), but they don't tell anyone they do this either.

e.g. If they had 100 people making submissions, and 5 of them said "the government is awesome", and 95 said "the government is shit", the submission website will show 5 glowing submissions: the general public (AND, from my subsequent investigations, the SENATORS THEMSELVES) have no idea about the missing 95 - giving everyone a misleading pro-government distorted picture of reality.

To answer your question: if I recall, the submission process does include mention of how to keep things confidential if you want to (both in words, and I think a checkbox at submit time) - I never opt for this of course. I've even taken to specifically asking them to publish, and trying to force them to comply with their own website public assurances "all submissions will be made public" - but in nearly every case, they refuse to publish my submissions still (every inquiry - Census_Senate_Inquiry, Digital_delivery_of_Government_services_Inquiry, Medicare_Breach_Inquiry, and nearly every time on more than 10 other government public submission cases)

FYI - in my example case, it was not a mistake - I asked for them NOT to make it confidential, and to please publish it, but they refused.

[mdavis-xyz]

Ok, here's the dot I'm adding. Is this a good summary?

Refused to publish valid Senate inquiry submissions if inconvenient, and instructed citizens to not publish those submissions themselves. Even senators don't have visibility of those submissions.

[gitcnd]

I'd word it more strongly:

Routinely censor inconvenient Senate Inquiry submissions, erase all trace of receiving them, and threaten submitters with legal consequences for revealing what's censored. Even senators don't read those submissions.

If you can - I'd make these words bold: "erase all trace of receiving them" - since that's the corrupt practice that's an order of magnitude worse than the original censorship.

There's proof supporting all of that; I know senators are unaware of the contents and existence of my submissions, but whether or not that had "visibility", or are just too lazy to read them, is unclear. Obviously, since they erase all records and inform that they will "not be providing your submission to anyone on request" there's no way to contact anyone else who they do this to (not even by FoI if that statement is true) so nobody can ever know how many submissions received by those public servants never reach the eyes of senators.

A Senate Inquiry into anything government-related is like asking the fox who guards the hen house to run an inquiry into himself, with the power to "vanish" any submissions he likes, before hading what's left over to other foxes to play whitewash over...