Government’s FOI adjustments may cowl up the following Robodebt – new analysis

The Royal Commission into Robodebt really useful making cupboard paperwork simpler to entry underneath FOI legal guidelines, discovering the present system thwarted investigations into the scheme.

The Prime Minister himself described Robodebt as a “gross betrayal and human tragedy”, but his authorities plans to make cupboard paperwork more durable to entry.

This is in direct defiance of the Robodebt Royal Commission’s suggestion to make cupboard paperwork accessible for public scrutiny.

“If cabinet documents had been public, the unlawful and cruel Robodebt scheme could have been exposed and prevented. For that reason, the Robodebt Royal Commission recommended making cabinet documents available under FOI,” stated Bill Browne, Director of the Australia Institute’s Democracy & Accountability Program.

“The Albanese government wants to make documents even harder to access, in defiance of the Royal Commission, increasing the risk the next Robodebt will happen in secret.”

“The over-use of the cabinet document exemption and other problems with the FOI system are critical reasons why Robodebt was allowed to continue with impunity for so long,” stated Maria O’Sullivan, Associate Professor at Deakin Law School.

“The proposed changes to the FOI Act will actually expand the cabinet exemption even further.”

The new analysis additionally reveals that it’s authorities inefficiency, not the variety of requests, behind the rising price of the FOI system.

“Information is to democratic participation as water is to life. People often take water for granted, until it stops flowing,” stated Rex Patrick, founding father of the Whistleblower Justice Fund.

Key findings

The Albanese Government is lagging on transparency:

• Fewer FOI choices are being made than in earlier years: 21,000 final 12 months down from 34,000 in 2017.
• Only 21% of 2023-24 FOI requests had been granted in full in comparison with 81% in 2006-07 (the final 12 months of the Howard authorities).
• In 2023-24 it took 51 hours, on common, to find out one FOI request, up from 13 hours in 2006-07.
• If the Albanese authorities achieved the Howard authorities’s cost-per-FOI-request ratio, taxpayers would save $61 million per 12 months.

The adjustments proposed within the Albanese authorities’s Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025 would exacerbate these issues:

• The price for entry would elevate lower than $500,000, in opposition to a scheme that price $86 million final 12 months.
• The Robodebt Royal Commission really useful making cupboard paperwork topic to freedom of data requests.
• The authorities’s adjustments would as an alternative make it even more durable to entry cabinet-related paperwork.
• The energy to refuse a request that might take greater than 40 hours to course of means the much less environment friendly an company is, the extra it may hold secret.

“Last year, it took over 50 hours to decide a single FOI request, up from 13 hours in 2007,” stated Bill Browne.

“In different phrases, the Albanese authorities employs 4 public servants to do what solely took one public servant underneath the Howard authorities. If the federal government is severe about bettering productiveness, it ought to begin with the way it runs the FOI system.

“The Albanese government wants to charge the public for FOI requests, but the fees for a whole year’s worth of FOI requests wouldn’t cover the FOI regulator’s legal fees in a single court case. “In the last year of the Howard government, 27,500 FOI requests were granted in full – compared to just 4,500 granted in full last year.”