The National Archives of Australia is dealing with such a massive bottleneck of requests for information potentially damaging to Australia’s national security it has called on Canberra’s most powerful bureaucrats to help blitz the backlog.
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The organisation is grappling with 12,453 applications from the public dating as far back as 2009 and all of these should have been dealt with in 90 days.
Some are requests for hundreds of pages and the National Archives has formed a special taskforce made up of every available staff member to crackdown on delays.
Researchers were often experiencing considerable delays because relevant departments must advise the National Archives whether information relating to defence, security or international relations should be released.
‘‘There are enough complaints out there to leave me in no doubt this is my highest priority at the National Archives,’’ its director-general David Fricker said on Tuesday.
‘‘The only reason the Archives exists is to preserve records which - after a certain passage of time and without sensitivities precluding them from being in the public domain - can be made available to the public.’’
Ten staff from his 400-head workforce have been put into the taskforce which will also help re-engineer processes at the Archives which have been unchanged in decades.
Mr Fricker was happy the backlog had been reduced from its peak of 19,000 as of October but said much more work was needed and added he was ‘‘not putting the blame at the feet of departments and agencies’’.
Within the bottleneck were 3100 records referred to DFAT - a number that had been growing steadily in the past three years.
National Archives staff oversee millions of records about past governments and store vast swathes of existing information generated daily by Tony Abbott’s government, including the Prime Minister’s own emails.
Mr Fricker has written to Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) director-general David Irvine, as well as Defence Secretary Dennis Richardson, Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade boss Peter Varghese and the nation’s top-ranking mandarin, Prime Minister and Cabinet secretary Ian Watt to put forward changes regarding the way requests are dealt with.
Mr Fricker said the departments and ASIO welcomed his suggestions which included seminars for public servants about sensitivities in records, sending lists of files to departments rather than whole records, department staff going to the Archives to see records and bureaucrats providing updates so certain files did not have to be sent to departments in the first place.
A total of 95 per cent of the requests received by the National Archives were dealt with within 90 days.
The organisation was also in discussions with so-called high-volume users to work out how their requests could be fine-tuned to reduce the amount of needless work.
They made up 1.5 per cent of applicants but accounted for 70 per cent of applications in the queue.
The National Archives received 40,000 applications a year which was expected to increase because information at the Archives is becoming fresher each year due to recent changes ensuring records do not have to be as old to be released.
By 2021 Commonwealth records will be available after 20 years, not 30 years and cabinet notebooks will be released after 30 years as opposed to 50 and these changes are being brought in partially each year.
Departments and agencies were also producing more information with the help of information technology which allowed the proliferation of communication and records.
