Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Hansard source

The government won't be supporting the amendment or the motion, but we appreciate Senator Davey's interest in the MDBA, and the government is working to comply with the order. Given the extremely broad parameters of the request, a considerable amount of departmental and agency resources is being expended to respond. An IT search of the department and MDBA systems identified over one million documents as being in the scope of the request. Within the department, the documents in scope number over 850,000. The standard assumption used in FOI requests is that it takes one minute to review each document. Based on this, to review each document would take one person working full time 8½ years. The department and the MDBA are working to narrow the scope of the search to identify a volume of documents that can be reasonably reviewed by officials while ensuring all documents that can be provided are provided to the Senate, given these constraints, to fulfil the intent of the order. Continuing to order these productions will not speed up this process.