Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to talk tonight a little bit about the freedom from information provisions that we have operating today within the federal government. I must say, as a sort of veteran of some 17 years in the state parliament, I was absolutely stunned at the amazingly devious tricks that are available to our federal agencies in order to avoid any scrutiny whatsoever of their operations. I have been trying since May 2014 to extract some documents on a range of matters of direct interest to the people of Perth and the people of Western Australia. These are documents relating primarily to the Perth Freight Link—a $1.6 billion project in which the federal government is injecting some $925 million. So it is a pretty big project, and you would think it would be one which we would actually have some documents relating to.

I first of all started with the minister, Minister Truss, and I put in an FOI application to his office. But apparently he has truly achieved a paperless and almost computer-less office. The only document that was forthcoming, after an apparently thorough search of his office, was a small email chain showing the great confusion between the state and federal governments about the announcement of this project. It starts off with someone from the Department of Infrastructure saying, 'Oh, Minister Briggs is preparing a visit to Perth tomorrow about the Perth Freight Link.' Then this goes to the main roads department and the main roads department say, 'Guys, does anyone know anything about this?' They forward it onto the state minister's office. The state minister's office says, 'Oh my God, does anyone know about this?' Then finally the chief of staff of the state minister contacts the office of the federal minister and says, 'Are you able to help us out on this one? You want to come over here but we actually do not know anything about it.' But, apparently, in the lead-up to the decision—a decision that predated this event that obviously was a complete surprise to the state government and not mentioned in the state government budget the week before—there was absolutely no documentation. So somehow or other the minister signed off on a project, spending $925 million of federal money, without a single document.

I did not stop there. I thought I would go to Infrastructure Australia and ask them for some documents. Now this is a laugh. This has been going on now, as I say, since May. First of all, they identify a whole heap of documents and come back and say, 'Yes, we have got 84 documents and it is going to cost you this amount of money.' We negotiated and had a bit of argy-bargy around it and I said, 'Okay, I will pay a couple of hundred dollars.' We sent them the money and then they began this long consultation. It goes on for months and months and then they came back, after the end of their consultation, and said, 'We are not going to give you any documents anyhow now. We have decided we are not going to give you any because they are all in the public domain.' But they just alert us to that. They will not send us the decision. We asked them if they could email the decision and they said, 'No, we must post it.' This goes on and it is a month before the determination arrives in the post telling us this. We then said, 'Can you give us a copy of the list and where these things might be in the public domain?' They said, 'No.' After a few more letters, they say, 'Yes', and they basically send us back a list of media releases and reports from the Sydney Morning Herald, which apparently is all they have in their office. So rather than these 84 documents that they originally identified, they have now only got six documents, half of which are press releases and the other half which are articles that have appeared somewhere in the paper. It is just completely and utterly farcical.

At the same time we have gone to the Department of Infrastructure and Regional Development, and we have—this has been going backwards and forwards. They have identified a lot of documents and they have said they want $2,500 to release these documents. I scaled the thing back: it was only dated from 1 September 2013; only in relation to this project; it did not have to have any raw data. I scaled it right back. They then sent a determination that they were not going to accept this because I wanted this for my personal interest and that this was 'not of interest to members of the public'. A $1.6 billion project—