A disappointing annual report on the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (FOI Act) was released with little fanfare last week by Special Minister of State Senator John Faulkner for the 2007-2008 financial year. This report accounts for two-thirds of the Rudd Government and one-third of the Howard Government.
Prior to the 2007 Federal Election the ALP pledged to break “the code of silence” it said developed under the Howard Government, promising to extensively overhaul the FOI laws.
If elected, it was reported at the time, the Labor Party said it’s changes would foster open government and relate to journalist privilege, whistleblower protection and privacy laws. Since then, the only current piece of reform sitting in queue and waiting before parliament is an amendment Bill to the FOI Act making it harder for politicians to issue conclusive certificates automatically blocking the release of certain information. They will still be able to send this to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal though so really the impact is quite minimal.
In fact there were 7% more refusals on ‘other’ requests (FOI requests relating to policy) than the previous year under the Howard Government. In total, the difference between 2006-2007 refusals was 4.39% compared to 4.36% in 2007-2008. A clear failure to genuinely open up access to Freedom of Information.
The only stated future ideas the Government has to introduce in a discussion paper are purely bureaucratically and do lip-service to their election promise:
* the establishment of an FOI Commissioner, who will be an independent statutory officer and
champion for FOI (further fattening of public service);
* implementation of other key recommendations of the 1996 joint Australian Law Reform Commission and Administrative Review Council Open government report (bureaucratic babble); and
* making access to a person’s own information free of charge (fees for FOI only account for 1.76% of costs and have not increased in 23 years).
What is also a failure is the massive increase in costs of processing FOI requests, now averaging over $940 (an increase of 27% from the previous year) - demonstrating a huge jump in departmental inefficiency (see year on year results below).
Just to refresh, the Commonwealth FOI Act gives you the legal right to:
* See documents held by Australian Government ministers, their departments and most statutory authorities (in this pamphlet these bodies are called agencies);
* Ask for information concerning you to be changed if it is incomplete, out of date, incorrect or misleading;
* Appeal against a decision not to grant access to a document or amend or annotate a personal record.The FOI Act also requires agencies to make available detailed information about the:
* way they are organised;
* functions they have;
* kinds of decisions they make;
* arrangements they have for public involvement in their work;
* documents they hold and how you can see them; and
* rules and practices which are used in making decisions which affect you.
OpenPolitik advises that, under the FOI Act, the following physical actions should also be developed and included in the draft discussion paper this year:
* republishing of agency data, functions, documents, etc in software developer-friendly Application Programming Interface (API) formats that can be republished and repurposed through additional non-gov.au channels in more useful formats
* API publishing of agency decisions to provide clearer and more timely accountability
* streamlining of decision-making and cross-agency collaboration; clearly an expensive bottleneck for the current operation.
These three innovative reforms alone would provide far more transparency and openness to FOI than the disappointing proposals currently sitting in queue before Parliament, and I encourage the Senator to consider them immediately if he is to retain any credibility in this portfolio.
Notes: to download or read the annual reports in more detail, click here.
