The ruling also shatters government claims the peak group,led by Mr Morrison with state premiers and territory chief ministers,has the status of a committee of federal cabinet and is therefore shielded from scrutiny.
Senator Patrick hailed the outcome on Thursday night as a “decisive win for transparency and accountability” because it rejected Mr Morrison’s attempts to claim a protection for national cabinet that it did not deserve under the law.
The South Australian senator took his claim to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal after the Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet rejected his applications under the Freedom of Information Act for documents about national cabinet meetings.
Federal Court judge Richard White,sitting as a presidential member of the AAT,ruled the department was wrong to reject many parts of the original request and ordered it to release the documents.
But the department gained a 28-day stay on the release of the documents while it considers whether to appeal the decision to the Federal Court.
While the department said the national cabinet was a “committee of cabinet” and therefore subject to the protections in FOI law for cabinet documents,Justice White rejected that argument after citing case law,English author Walter Bagehot in “The English Constitution” in 1867 and Fraser government minister Ian Viner in his speech introducing the FOI law in 1982.
“The mere use of the name ‘national cabinet’ does not,of itself,have the effect of making a group of persons using the name a ‘committee of the cabinet’. Nor does the mere labelling of a committee as a ‘cabinet committee’ have that effect,” Justice White said in his judgment.