The prime minister’s office has been ordered to search for text messages from Barnaby Joyce to Scott Morrison reporting on his work as drought envoy, in the second ruling this week on freedom of information battles involving Morrison’s phone.
On Wednesday, the information watchdog ordered the PMO search Morrison’s phone for text messages from his friend – the prominent QAnon supporter Tim Stewart – after the PMO refused a request made by Guardian Australia.
The acting information commissioner, Elizabeth Hampton has taken a similar approach to a freedom of information request for text messages from the deputy prime minister while he was in the role of drought envoy.
For nine months between 2018 and 2019, while Joyce was on the backbench, he served as a drought envoy, visiting and reporting back on drought-affected communities, accruing $675,000 in travel costs in that time.
After criticism from Labor that no public report on his work was produced, Joyce said he had sent reports via text message.
“If you say a report is a written segment to the prime minister … then they definitely went to him, I definitely sent them, I sent them by SMS to him and they were read,” Joyce told the ABC in September 2019.
Tom Swann, then Australia Institute senior researcher, and Guardian Australia filed separate freedom of information requests for those text message “reports”.
However, in October 2019, the PMO refused the requests for the texts between Joyce and Morrison “regarding his work as drought envoy” by claiming it “would substantially and unreasonably interfere with the prime minister’s functions”.
Joyce said publicly he had sent an “awful lot” of reports via text message to the prime minister’s phone and that he would be “happy” to release the messages, but it was not his call.
Swann appealed against the decision to the Office of the Australian information commissioner, and two and a half years later, the acting commissioner, Elizabeth Hampton, has ordered the prime minister’s office to process the request in 30 days, finding the request could not be practically refused.
Swann argued the messages could be downloaded to avoid affecting the PM’s functions, and as the only record of Joyce’s work as drought envoy, the text messages were official documents of a minister under the freedom of information act.
The PMO erroneously claimed Swann was seeking two years’ worth of text messages, and would not provide the information commissioner with a breakdown of the 50 hours it estimated would take to process the request.
“I am not satisfied that PMO’s estimate of the processing time is reasonable.”
The ruling is near-identical to the decision Hampton made regarding the 2019 text messages between Morrison and Tim Stewart.
The prime minister’s office has until the end of April to provide a decision on both requests, regardless of the upcoming election and when the government enters caretaker mode.
In Senate estimates on Thursday, the finance minister, Simon Birmingham, said he did not believe a decision had been made on whether to appeal against the Guardian Australia ruling to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. The prime minister’s office has not responded to a request for comment.
However, if there is a change of government before the cases advance, FoI law expert Peter Timmins said that would make it unlikely the text messages would ever be handed over.
“If … we have a different prime minister there by the time this issue is moved ahead, it’s very unlikely that records of [that kind] will be passed to the new prime minister, which would mean that you’ve run into a dead end,” he said.
