THE Crime and Misconduct Commission (CMC) information director who mistakenly lifted a ban on sensitive documents from the Fitzgerald Inquiry did so because he thought they were already publicly available.
A hearing is under way at Queensland parliament into how the 65-year ban was lifted for 741 documents in February 2012.
It had been imposed upon the inquiry's completion in 1989.
The documents contained information about targets and informants from the inquiry into police corruption, which led to the jailing of the state's police commissioner and politicians in the Joh Bjelke-Petersen-led government.
Another 4000 documents were shredded.
CMC director of information management Peter Duell said he had reduced the restricted access period on the documents to 20 years, meaning they went into the public domain.
He believed when the original 19,000 documents from the inquiry were transferred to State Archives, a process started years ago, it was widely understood the most sensitive information had a 100-year ban, and the remainder had a 65-year ban as a precautionary approach.
He was under the wrong impression that the latter were mostly public exhibits and were available anyway through transcripts and tabled documents from the inquiry.
He said he had been inundated with requests for documents, so he thought lifting the ban wouldn't be controversial.
"With a number of requests coming through I asked the acting records manager to review the restricted access period and make recommendations to make what was publicly available information, available to the public," he said.
He told the hearing the material was made public without an audit of its contents.
He didn't realise at the time that some of the documents he was reclassifying were sensitive.
"That's proved to be the case now," he said.
"In hindsight I can think of a lot of things that should have been done at that point in time."
The CMC was warned in May 2012 by the former head of police's Special Branch, Barry Krosch, that information had been made available which shouldn't have been.
Mr Krosch told the hearing on Wednesday he noticed 1988 surveillance logs from the branch were publicly available and named targets of operations.
"I just hope that targets from that era don't realise the reports are there for them to inspect," he warned the CMC in an email.
It took eight months for the CMC to reclassify the information as secret, but it only informed the parliamentary committee which oversees it last week.
Under questioning from the counsel assisting the inquiry, Peter Davis, Mr Duell admitted reclassifying the documents was a grave mistake.
"It was an error that's for sure, a very serious error," Mr Duell said.
"It was a huge mistake."
Mr Duell said he relied on a three-page librarian's memo to make the changes and consulted then-acting Crime and Misconduct Commission chair Warren Strange.
Mr Duell said he became aware of the problem in May 2012, when Mr Krosch informed the CMC, and he immediately changed 14 of the 17 files back to a 65-year ban.
He believed the others weren't sensitive but again in September, eight months later, Mr Krosch found files available which contained sensitive information.
CMC chair Ross Martin stood down last Friday for health reasons and Mr Strange is again acting in the position.
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