Back in July, we noted the attendance of former prime minister Kevin Rudd, now US ambassador, at the Republican National Convention, not without a raised eyebrow on account of some of his previous rhetoric concerning Donald Trump. We decided to take advantage of Australia’s peerless freedom of information regime to uncover any correspondence between Rudd and the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade in the lead-up to the convention. What preparation was required? What issues needed to be braced for?
After two requests to extend the deadline, the department provided us with the documents and, look, brace yourself, because it’s incendiary in its clarity and candour:
Oh no, wait, I must have been thinking of something else, but because what we actually received were eight almost entirely blank pages. Interestingly, the material is blanked out neither because of international relations concerns nor issues regarding the agency’s ability to do its job, but because it was “irrelevant” to the scope of our request (that’s what section 22(1)(a)(ii) of the FOI Act deals with).
This is just one of the genres of heavily redacted documents one might come up against in the FOI game.
Other curiosities include the 2021 request for a report from the Ethics Centre, which provided advice on a “feasibility study into proxy indicators for monitoring Afghanistan”, something for which DFAT paid nearly $80,000. The Ethics Centre must have made some pretty bold design choices, given many of the images had to be blanked out for privacy reasons when the FOI request came in.
Much weirder was the time Crikey spent months trying to find out which members of the Attorney-General’s Department’s ironically named “Open Government Forum” were responsible for voting down an initiative that would have… made the government more open.
Then there’s the “Why’d you bother?” subgenre.
Regarding a visa application or matters pertaining to the National Security Committee, there must have been defensible reasons to blank out everything in a document, rather than make the information public. So why release anything at all?
Finally, there are the great anti-climaxes, perhaps best exemplified by the three-year battle for then attorney-general George Brandis’ diary, which revealed nothing out of the ordinary.
Crikey has long been pushing for improvements to the FOI system. Failing that, we can at least point out when it’s a bit rubbish.
So consider this a call-out. If you’re a reader who has ever tried to take advantage of our transparency system, only to return with somehow less than nothing, we want to hear from you. Send us your least worthwhile FOIs: boss@crikey.com.au.
