24.
67 Speaking in favour of the relevant amendment to the Bill for the FOI Act in the Senate in 1981, Senator Evans drew attention to the then recent enactment of the High Court of Australia Act 1979 (Cth) when he said[1]:
"The utility, or indeed the necessity, for an exemption for administrative questions of this kind is in fact made more obvious by the recent change in the legislation governing the High Court of Australia. These sorts of administrative questions are now clearly within the Court's jurisdiction, whereas previously the majority of administrative matters of this kind were performed by or through the Attorney-General's Department and as such were the subject of ordinary access procedures so far as information was concerned."
68 The word "administrative" was obviously being used by the Senate Standing Committee in 1979 and by Senator Evans in 1981 in a sense narrower and more specific than the same word had earlier been used in the Administrative Decisions (Judicial Review) Act 1977 (Cth) as part of the definition of a decision to which that Act was to apply. The focus of the amendment to the Bill for the FOI Act recommended in 1979 and implemented in 1981 was not on the separation of judicial power from executive power – after all, the same distinction between "administrative" and "non-administrative" was being employed in respect of industrial bodies which did not exercise judicial power. The focus was more prosaically on ensuring inclusion within the scope of the FOI Act of documents in the possession of courts and industrial bodies which related to matters of organisation and management of the kind which in 1979 were still being provided to the High Court by the Division of Judicial Administration within the Attorney-General's Department and of the kind which by 1981 had been taken over by the High Court itself with the commencement of the High Court of Australia Act 1979 (Cth) in 1980.
69 Section 6A was then inserted into the FOI Act two years later by the Public Service Reform Act 1984 (Cth)[2]. Its insertion was contemporaneous with, and consequential upon, the amendment by the Public Service Reform Act 1984 (Cth) of the Governor-General Act 1974 (Cth) which created the statutory office of Official Secretary[3]. Immediately before those amendments in 1984, the Official Secretary had been an officer of the Australian Public Service
