Disdain for national archives at odds with conservatism

Senator Amanda Stoker has called for a different approach to archives to ‘simply putting a few more dollars in the tin’. Picture: NCA NewsWire/Gary Ramage

Assistant Attorney-General Amanda Stoker is a busy woman. You could tell last week as she appeared before the Senate Legal and Constitutional Affairs Legislation Committee and treated the National Archives of Australia like something she had unfortunately stepped in.

Irreplaceable archival records falling irretrievably to bits? Well, she said briskly, this was “just part of the ageing process”.

“Time marches on,” Stoker continued, “and all sources degrade over time.”

Imagine had she said this about that consecrated cash sponge, the Australian War Memorial. Imagine had last year’s spray paint been left on Captain Cook’s statue on grounds that a little graffiti never hurt anything.

The point is that while time does march on, NAA’s business is to stay in step — otherwise it is in breach of Part 5 section 24 of the Archives Act 1983. Stoker, incidentally, identifies as a “conservative”. Remember when conservatives conserved things?

In January last year, the government received the Functional and Efficiency Review of NAA by David Tune, a former secretary of the Department of Finance. Tune’s finding was that despite it being a decade since the National Archives Digital Transition Policy included measures to support the transition from paper to digital records, NAA, winnowed away by years of budget cuts and “efficiency dividends”, was barely marking time.

Tune became the latest to prophecy that without the investment of $67.7 million over seven years — in budgetary terms, a rounding error — at-risk records would disintegrate. NAA, for example, is a repository for 11 million photographic and 400,000 magnetic media and film items. Tune concluded: “There is international consensus, supported by UNESCO, that magnetic media will start to become inaccessible by 2025. Therefore, there is a likely loss of 94 per cent of the collection.” Ninety-four per cent, eh? Oh, just part of the ageing process … Eighteen months on, the government is yet to formally respond to the Tune review. But the barren budget, and Stoker’s glib performance, bode ill.

Naturally, without specifying how this would look because she clearly hasn’t the faintest, Stoker called for transforming “the way we do archives” with “a different approach to simply putting a few more dollars in the tin”.

Australia signed UNESCO’s 2011’s Universal Declaration on Archives describing them as “a unique and irreplaceable heritage passed from one generation to another”, integral to “underpinning accountable and transparent administrative actions”, and concluding: “Open access to archives enriches our knowledge of human society, promotes democracy, protects citizens’ rights and enhances the quality of life.” Stoker thinks archives are a tin.

Actually, archives are people, and not the great people, but those who otherwise would leave no trace: the workers, the immigrants, the servicemen, the public servants, and, not least, the Indigenous. Of our collecting institutions, the NAA is the most truly democratic — of the people, by the people, for the people.

Recordkeeping, furthermore, is fundamental to the protection of citizens and the prevention of harm. Observed Tune: “The Royal Commission into Institutional Responses to Child Sexual Abuse found that rights and entitlements were jeopardised, and perpetrators of child abuse were often not identified promptly because reliable documentation was either not created or managed appropriately so that it could be used as evidence.”

In the unlikely event Stoker has read the Tune review, or any of the more than 100 submissions made to it, she would be aware how the creep of austerity under consecutive Coalition governments, including the loss of almost a fifth of its staff, has caused what Professor Anne Twomey of Sydney University describes as “the tragic degradation of what was once a very fine institution”.

Day-to-day service standards have collapsed, as Dr Joanna Sassoon of Curtin University put it: “We’ll be dead before we get access.” The result, as retired High Court Justice Michael Kirby observed, is likely a compromising of historical standards: “History built on sound data is more likely to be reliable than history built on impressions, anecdotes and imperfect recollections.”

Odd, isn’t it? The NAA is a legacy of the Menzies era, the Commonwealth Archives Office, having been peeled from the National Library of Australia 60 years ago. And here’s a government that advocates good, wholesome, old-fashioned history – none of that fancypants theory nonsense, oh no. Yet it seems history based on “impressions, anecdotes and imperfect recollections” is just fine — providing, of course, they reinforce the right prejudices. That’s the undercurrent of this whole affair; here is a government so dedicated to the capture of power and fulfilment of personal ambition that its attitude to anything beyond its tiny partisan concerns is one of dismal uninterest. Let’s hope whomever unseals the Morrison cabinet papers in 2051, assuming anybody has troubled to keep them, remembers what philistines and vandals they were.