Written by John Pane, EFA Chair.
Following some very spirited debate today in the Senate, EFA is quite happy to announce that the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill has been withdrawn.
In respect of Senator Gallagher’s (LAB) comments in the Senate today that “….the intention of the bill was to modernise the FOI process, reduce hours and dollars spent on processing requests and protect public servants from abuse”, EFA considers these comments to be quite an example of political doublespeak.
There are numerous faults in this bill. The government might call them “design features” but you can be sure all of them are significantly harmful to transparency, accountability and our democracy.
The bill :
- Contains a fallacious justification for the imposition of processing fees through equivocation and false generalisation
- Shifts the focus from documents to people requesting access to documents – threatening whistleblowers, investigative journalists and ordinary citizens
- Grants public officials anonymity while demanding the identity of private citizens
- Seeks to limit frivolous and vexatious requests despite there currently only being two vexatious applicant declarations in effect.
- Seeks to solve the stated problem that the government was being swamped by FOI requests made by AI bots but proffers no evidence in support of this claim. The government’s claim is actually contradicted by the Parliamentary Library in its Bills Digest.
While not entirely explicit, the discourse that has accompanied the Government’s push to enact this Bill has, in the main, been framed by reference to the potential actions or intentions of undesirable access applicants. “Foreigners” have been cast in the light of “potential” threats. The confected “artificial intelligence” and “bot” bogies have been advanced by Ministers as a threat to Australia and Australian taxpayers. Interestingly, nothing has been said about keeping from public view the flawed decisions and inappropriate behaviour of elected officials or public servants behaving inappropriately being kept away from the public eye. All we have seen are steps that will make it harder to access government documents. This has a direct and harmful effect on government transparency, accountability and our democracy.
At a time when this government has surrendered itself to Big Tech’s “everything AI” siren song, Tranche II of the Privacy Act reform package lies gathering dust in a broom cupboard somewhere in Canberra and the Productivity Commission publicly calling for a weakening of privacy laws in Australia (because “productivity”, brilliant!!), this Government’s FOI Amendment Bill is the opposite of what we need. Australia needs more transparency and accountability from its elected officials and public servants, not less. Our citizens, whistleblowers and investigative journalists require greater privacy protections.
The FOI Act does require true and fundamental reform, and that reform must start with repairing the foundations of the FOI system. Our FOI law must operate on a default pro-disclosure bias in the public interest and there must be a paring back of exceptions that have been broadened by successive governments and increased secrecy since the 1980s (such as the perpetual “get out of jail free” card) Cabinet in Confidence exception.
EFA strongly supports the work of the Centre for Public Integrity, Open Australia and Right to Know in opposing the FOI Amendment Bill and we are aligned with their submissions. EFA further supports the commentary made today in the Senate by Senators Shoebridge, Pocock, Peyman and Cash in respect of this fundamentally flawed bill.
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