Labor is facing opposition from pretty much everyone on its freedom of information (FOI) bill.
Crikey understands the crossbench, including the Greens, intends to oppose it. Members of that bloc held a press conference this morning to spell out the reasons why.
In a press release, a group of 10 MPs that included independent MPs Allegra Spender, Helen Haines, Dai Le, and Zali Steggall, and Senators David Pocock, David Shoebridge and Jacqui Lambie said the government’s bill should be abandoned.
“When we examine the history of government failures, such as robodebt, it is clear government and bureaucratic decisions need greater transparency, not less,” the statement said.
The Coalition is also opposed in principle, although those members will reserve their judgement until a Senate committee finishes its inquiry into the bill, Crikey understands. The inquiry is set to report on December 3.
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That means the government will struggle to pass the bill through the Senate — where it holds 29 out of 76 seats — unless substantial changes are made.
“Labor’s FOI bill makes a broken system worse and let’s be clear, it faces an uphill battle in the Senate because the numbers just aren’t there,” said Shoebridge, the Greens’ justice spokesperson, in comments supplied to Crikey.
“There are only two pathways for Labor in the Senate, one is cutting a deal with the Coalition and the other is with the Greens. We have made it clear this bill will not pass with Greens support.”
He said the bill failed to address the extensive delays and heavy redactions associated with the current FOI system, and that the Greens would be ready to support “real reform to fix” the system.
As Catherine Williams and Gabrielle Appleby of the Centre for Public Integrity noted in a piece for The Australian Financial Review on Tuesday, the Senate inquiry into the bill received “virtually unanimous damning assessments” in its submissions inbox, which closed last week.
“No supporter outside the government was to be found,” they wrote. The Australian Public Service Commission, Services Australia and the Attorney-General’s Department were the only three stakeholders that appeared to endorse the bill.
Part of the bill’s aim, according to Attorney-General Michelle Rowland, is to strike an “appropriate balance between an applicant’s access rights and taxpayers’ resources in providing such access”. To that end, fees would be imposed on requests, a 40-hour processing cap would be introduced, and applicants would be required to identify themselves by name, among other changes.
At a Senate estimates hearing on Tuesday, Celeste Moran from the Attorney-General’s Department’s identity and information division said the government had relied on a recommendation in the Senate’s 2023 report into the operation of FOI laws to justify the proposal to impose fees on requests.
However, Liberal-National Senator Paul Scarr said that as one of the authors of that report, he viewed that recommendation differently.
“Regarding the comment in relation to the fees and charges that you referred to, do you acknowledge that it’s contained in a recommendation that actually said you needed to reform the system in all the other ways the recommendations suggested and then, after three years of reforming the system to improve it, you could perhaps look at whether or not you needed to introduce charges to address things like vexatious proceedings?” Scarr said.
“I did try to make clear that the recommendation in relation to fees and charges was to be part of a future review of the FOI regime and that that hadn’t occurred,” Moran responded.
The estimates hearing also heard that the department had received 21 FOI requests about the reforms itself, and that it had sought time extensions from the Office of the Information Commissioner (OAIC) on all of them. The OAIC rejected all those applications.
“We were advised by the OAIC that they had rejected our request for an extension,” Kenneth Eagle of the office of corporate counsel said. “It came after some of the due dates for some of the requests. So they were already overdue.”