Federal Government to Start Charging for Freedom of Information Requests

Already facing questions for releasing just 36 percent of the information sought under Freedom of Information (FOI) requests—less than the 59 percent approved by the former Coalition government—the Albanese government has announced that it will begin charging fees for access to Commonwealth documents.

This will, it says, assist public servants in providing “free and frank” advice to ministers and stop large volumes of anonymous FOI ­requests from AI bots.

Under current Freedom of Information laws, anyone can request information held by the government, from details of who has met with Cabinet members, papers prepared for politicians by the public service, or their own file held by a government agency.

There are reasons for some information to be redacted, or an outright refusal—for instance, prejudicing national security—and a charge can be imposed if it would take an inordinate amount of time to collate the response or to redact it.

Journalists, Politicians and Ordinary People Will Pay

On Sept. 3, Attorney General Michelle Rowland will introduce legislation that charges a fee for every request, with the only exception being applications for personal information.

That means journalists, activists, politicians and their staff, as well as ordinary citizens wanting to know what their government is up to, will have to pay.

While the exact fee is not yet known, charges by state and territory agencies range from $30 to $58 per request.

In a statement, Rowland said the change aims to ­”address barriers to frank and fearless advice from the public service by ensuring the test for accessing deliberative documents is clearer in law and easily understood.”

Certain websites or AI bots were “enabling large volumes of vague, anonymous, vexatious, abusive and frivolous requests—tying up resources, costing taxpayers money, and delaying genuine requests,” she said.

The new law would “strengthen” the application process to avoid this, including a ban on anonymous requests.

She said a single automated FOI generator had made 1,000 requests across just a few weeks, and another had generated 580 requests to a single agency, which had taken all the resources from one public service FOI team for more than three months.

Minister for Health Mark Butler defended the changes.

“Many of them, we’re sure, are AI bot-generated requests. They may be linked to foreign actors, foreign powers, criminal gangs … we don’t know where those requests come from,” he told reporters.

He described the charges as “modest,” and said someone had to pay for the cost of processing FOI requests, and currently, that was taxpayers.

Butler has recently been faced with scrutiny by FOI requests from journalists, which revealed the National Disability Insurance Agency recommended ignoring disability advocacy groups, and that the Health Department doubted whether Labor’s proposed incentive would be enough to convince more doctors to sign up to bulk-billing.

Shadow Attorney General Julian Leeser said Labor had “talked a big game” on transparency, but failed to deliver.

“We’ve seen increases in refusals of FOI [requests] since they came to office,” he told reporters in Canberra.

“We’ve seen stakeholders being forced to sign … non-disclosure agreements in relation to legislation as diverse as workplace relations and religious discrimination; we’ve seen the government deliberately flouting Senate orders for production of documents.

“We’re now seeing changes to the standing orders to make the government less accountable, and we’ve seen the staff of members of parliament, whose job it is to hold the government to account, slashed.”

Coalition Open to Change, But Not a ‘Transparency Tax’

Leeser says the Coalition is open to reforms for the FOI system to address the issues identified by the government, including those related to bots and “nefarious actors,” but says he’s “very concerned about a transparency tax.”

Former human rights commissioner, now shadow minister for small business, industrial relations, and employment, called the proposed fees a “truth tax,” and said Rowland needs to provide hard evidence for her claims that the system is being overrun by bots, criminals, or foreign actors.

“The claim they put out there is that there are bots out there doing things, now that may be happening, but … this is dealt with by software platforms every day,” he said.

“If there’s other information that’s being accessed by nefarious actors, provide evidence where this is a problem, but again, provide an alternative solution.

“Instead, they’re just imposing a veil of secrecy over the entire government. It seems like what you get when you have a government with a 94-seat majority and doesn’t want scrutiny.”

Rowland recently appointed a senior bureaucrat from her own department, Alice Linacre, as the new Freedom of Information Commissioner, saying at the time that “The Albanese Government is committed to ensuring that the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner is appropriately resourced to continue its important work.”

As Communications Minister, Rowland shepherded controversial “misinformation and disinformation” legislation through Parliament—laws the opposition said “belonged in a dictatorship.”

Shortly after he was first elected, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese characterised the government of his predecessor, Scott Morrison, as having been one of “deception,”  “government in secret,” and responsible for an “unprecedented trashing of our democracy.”

In a major speech in 2019, the then-opposition leader said: “We don’t need a culture of secrecy. We need a culture of disclosure. Protect whistleblowers—expand their protections and the public interest test,” and promised to “reform freedom of information laws so they can’t be flouted as they have been by this government.”