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

We need to rename the Freedom of Information Act because its current name constitutes deceptive and misleading conduct. It must be renamed the 'Freedom from Information Act'. For over a year, I have been trying to get some documents relating to the $1.6 billion Perth Freight Link and have drawn a blank. I thought it was pretty extraordinary that the department of infrastructure were demanding over $2,500 in charges because they reckoned that I wanted the documents for my own interest and not to inform the public debate. That absurd decision is currently being challenged in the AAT.

But now we have a new challenge. Yesterday the department told us that they have decided that, even if I pay the ransom, I will be getting only the publicly available documents. Extraordinarily, they have accepted the argument from Main Roads WA that, if a document is not in the public domain, it is inherently confidential and therefore can be exempted. They argue that, if the confidential exchanges between the state and the Commonwealth government are made public, it would damage relations between the Commonwealth and the state, and therefore all documents are to be exempt.

So why do we have FOI legislation, if all documents that are not in the public domain are excluded by definition? And how can having traffic counts between— (Time expired)