Non-government school and non-government school association meeting and event briefs prepared for Minister Clare since 23 May 2022

Question

Senator KOVACIC: Last week I wrote to you and asked you for a list of meeting or event briefs from 23 May 2022 in relation to non-government school visits and events by non-government school associations. Did you receive that letter? Mr Cook: I've got it, yes. We haven't been able to provide that information in the time available, because we would have to go back and print out every event brief that has existed since 2022, and we'd have to manually identify whether it was a government or non-government school. We don't have an IT system that enables it to be- Senator KOVACIC: You don't categorise them? Mr Cook: No. Our IT system is just for briefing. We don't say, 'This is for a non-government school; this is for a government school.' Senator KOVACIC: You can't mark it between- Mr Cook: We would literally have to print out every single brief and we would have to visually identify whether they were (a) a school visit, (b) a government school visit-all those sorts of things. Senator KOVACIC: I thought you would categorise them as 'primary', 'high', 'government' and 'nongovernment'? Mr Cook: The PDMS system, which is the system we use for briefs, simply says 'meeting briefs', 'briefs to the department', 'correspondence briefs'. There's no real other categorisation, to the best of my knowledge, that we have in the system. When I use it, I have to search deeply myself. .................................................. Senator KOVACIC: Secretary, I wrote to you a week ago and specifically asked for that information. Why is it so cumbersome to collate that? How many briefs would you have done for the minister? Mr Cook: Since 2022? Senator KOVACIC: Yes. How many would you do? Mr Cook: Thousands. Senator KOVACIC: You do thousands of briefs? Mr Cook: Maybe hundreds rather than thousands. Let me take that down a bit because I just don't know. But, if you look at the number of event briefs since 2022, it would definitely be hundreds. Senator KOVACIC: I would like if you could provide that information to me when you do have it. It would be useful. Mr Cook: We'll take it on notice and see what we can do.

Answer

Please see the attached PDF.

Documents

• Question with answer (PDF) (opens in a new tab)
• SQ26-000668.pdf (opens in a new tab)