Larissa Waters (Queensland, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Freedom of Information Legislation Amendment (Improving Access and Transparency) Bill 2018, and I do so in the context that this is the least transparent government in history. They do everything possible to resist scrutiny. They systematically obfuscate, and, when they're backed into a corner or people are getting dangerously close to an inconvenient truth, they try the dead cat strategy. Under this government it's freedom from information, rather than freedom of information. So we're very pleased this bill is coming on for debate today.

The suspension of parliament sittings this year has really emphasised the critical role that parliament plays as an oversight and accountability mechanism. FOI laws are a core component of a transparent and accountable government, and they allow timely access to information so that the community, the media and other political parties can understand and scrutinise government decisions. But the current FOI regime has been systematically undermined. Some applicants are having to wait more than 12 months and pay exorbitant fees only to receive heavily redacted documents. This is not how robust democracies are meant to work. The Greens believe that national FOI laws need to be strengthened to facilitate proper scrutiny and to encourage well-informed public debate on issues that affect the nation. This bill is a step in that direction, and we will be supporting it.

I note that FOI laws haven't been comprehensively reviewed since, I believe, 1994, so we actually need a full root-and-branch review. When the government made a commitment to the national action plan for open government in 2016 and then a commitment to the second national action plan in 2018, there was some hope for greater accountability, but, sadly, we've seen absolutely no action. In fact, we've gone backwards, and this continues to be one of the most secretive governments in Australia's history. They reject the premise of the question. It's the Canberra bubble. They don't answer questions, or they come back months and months later with answers that are so massaged and workshopped that they are meaningless. They refuse FOI requests or they redact them beyond utility. The other tactic that has been frequently used and abused in recent times is the delegation of decision-making functions to bodies like the national cabinet, the Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility, the Great Barrier Reef Foundation and the COVID-19 Coordination Commission. Delegation to those sorts of bodies is making it harder and harder for the public to access information, because frequently those bodies are not subject to FOI laws.

In 2013, Dr Allan Hawke recommended a comprehensive review of Australia's FOI regime. Sadly, Dr Hawke's recommendations have been ignored—much as they were for our environmental laws, I might add. In fact, the Abbott government proposed abolishing the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, which is of course the body that reviews FOI decisions, but the Senate blocked him from doing that. Abbott had to settle for slashing the information commissioner's funding. So they’ve now got fewer than half their previous staff, yet they have a 72 per cent increase in complaints. So, of course, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has been unable to properly discharge their functions. They are underresourced and overworked.

The Guardian's transparency project has described the culture of secrecy within government departments as being:

… aided by a flawed freedom of information regime beset by delays, understaffing and unnecessary obfuscation.

The key findings of the transparency project's research include the fact that at least 20 agencies have reduced the size of their FOI team. The Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility has rejected 99.4 per cent of the FOI requests that it has received. That's got to be a record. People will remember that this is the same body that approved lending Adani $1 billion in taxpayer funds and the same body that is currently working behind the scenes to support gas pipelines for this government's misguided gas led recovery.

The transparency project has also found that more than 2,000 FOI requests have taken longer than three months past the statutory time frame to be finalised and that the Department of Home Affairs is a serial offender in not meeting statutory time frames. Perhaps that won't surprise anyone. Many documents have lost relevance by the time they're released, if they are released at all.

In the past year, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner has found that the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Department of Human Services and the Australian Federal Police have unreasonably and inexplicably delayed FOI decisions, which raises concerns that those agencies are holding back information based on political cycles. The ANAO also found a 68.4 per cent increase since 2012 in the number of exemptions to FOI disclosure relied on by various agencies. The Department of the Environment and Energy was criticised for falling months behind in updating its FOI disclosure log. Thankfully—according to answers I've received to questions in estimates—that problem seems to have been rectified. Timely access to information should be the cornerstone of any government, no matter which political flavour it is. Yet this government is determined to hide information.

The Your Right to Know campaign, which was championed by media organisations, provided more examples of the sorts of information being denied to the public, including information about the scale of abuse and neglect in the aged-care sector, whether Australians are fighting as mercenaries in the bitter conflict in Yemen, communications between Australia and the UK about journalist Julian Assange, and awarding a $1 billion government travel contract to AOT, which is a subsidiary of Helloworld, which was run by then Treasurer Joe Hockey. He was a shareholder in Helloworld, and I think they also gave a freebie to Senator Cormann for a while there. FOI applications from journalists pursuing that story were repeatedly delayed on a number of different grounds.

Senator Scarr interjecting—