Thirteen months ago I asked the AFP for documents associated with the investigation – between 1989 and 1995 – of the murder of Assistant Commissioner Colin Winchester, allegedly by David Eastman. Six months before this, the ACT government had appointed an inquiry into Eastman's guilt, and lawyers appointed to the inquiry had begun preparing for it by asking, informally and by subpoena, for police and prosecution files on the case.

My request was in four parts. One involved investigations into the possible involvement of Italian organised crime. I asked for a list of documents handed to over to counsel assisting the Eastman Inquiry – not, I made clear, the documents themselves, but merely a list of them. I was also looking for AFP files showing what they knew about the sacking, for professional and scientific misconduct, of their major scientific witness, Robert Barnes, by the Victorian Police Forensic Science Unit, just before the trial, a fact that had not been disclosed to the defence before the trial. And I also asked for statements gathered by a particular detective, John Lawler, then the head of the Australian Crime Commission, during investigations into the sale of a rifle by a Queanbeyan gun dealer, Louis Klarenbeck.

The AFP approach to the request was quickly demonstrated. A member of the AFP FOI team sent off a memo to relevant AFP sections, saying that "at this stage, the FOI team is considering whether a decision to exempt all documents would be appropriate in the light of the inquiry" and inviting them to advise whether disclosure "could impact negatively on the conduct of the inquiry".

This almost exactly exemplified my general feeling that the AFP, under present management, does not follow the spirit of FOI or open government that the Information Commissioner is constantly enjoining on the public administration, and sometimes, proclaiming to have occurred. But I must be wrong about this, because I complained, and an independent AFP officer examined the AFP's conscience and concluded that the intent of the memo was not to solicit potential reasons for refusal, "but rather to initiate consultation".

I am glad that they were doing some consultation, because they were doing none with me, except by peremptory letter saying that they would refuse a part of my request unless I cut it back. The FOI reforms provide for such a shotgun method of consultation, and, as one comes to expect, the AFP (without any discouragement from the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner) seems to have come to think that this dispenses with telephone calls, emails and other processes of clarifying requests generally enjoined by the Act. Whenever, incidentally, I complain that the AFP neither makes consultative telephone calls nor returns messages, I am told they have tried to ring, but missed me, a somewhat strange thing given the want of secretarial records, and the fact that their own documentation of requests contain no record of this.

Be all of that as it may, the AFP asked me for an extension of time to deal with the request. I agreed, but pointed out they had had no discussions with me about progress, and were presuming on my good nature in failing to give any reason for delay. A month passed without any further progress – or anything much in the way of AFP activity, as disclosed by their own records – and they asked the OAIC to grant an extension of time. I objected, pointing out that the request was already more than a month over the statutory limit, and that at no stage had I been called to discuss, consult, or get any idea of progress. This was put back to the police – who said they had sent me the shotgun letter – and the delegate granted an extension of a further month. I was furious, and at that stage lodged my "FOI-squared" application – a term of art for an FOI request for documents associated with processing the request.

Another dreary month passed, and the AFP asked the OAIC for yet another extension. They were refused, because of my opposition, and the request, being over time, was thus deemed to have been refused. I immediately lodged an appeal, which takes the matter from the AFP and gives the OAIC the power to make a decision. Assuming the AFP co-operates by supplying documents, arguments and so on, of course.

Alas the OAIC is already so besieged with appeals, and other time-consuming activities (many self-inflicted by its own ultra-bureaucratic approach to every task it thinks it has to perform) that it has become a byword for delay. The most recent decision on file, for example, concerns a request made 19 months ago. So slow is the process (and, sometimes so unsatisfactory the jurisprudence) that many FOI users would now rather that the Information Commissioner appeal system was dropped as a experiment that didn't work, with a direct right of appeal restored to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal. The AAT can, usually, get out a decision within a few months of lodgment, and, when it had the jurisdiction, it was more liberal, and a lot less legalistic, in approach than the OAIC has proven to be. Quick, cheap and right is hardly the OAIC byword.

Ultimately the AFP provided what purported to be reasons for the deemed refusal. When that came, the AFP said only 14 documents – totalling 79 pages – had been relevant to my request. Of these 75 were blank once the AFP completed the process of claiming exemptions. It insisted it had done a very diligent computer-based search of the AFP investigation case management system. Exemptions were claimed on the basis that disclosure could prejudice the impartial adjudication of the Eastman inquiry, could disclose (even, apparently 20 years after the fact) police methodology in criminal investigations, could disclose the identities of informants or have an unreasonable impact on the proper and efficient working of the AFP.

On the Lawler part of the request it went cute: "Although the AFP has identified documents authored by John Lawler and about Klarenbeck, no documents were identified that were prepared by John Lawler as to his dealings with Klarenbeck . . . on this basis this part of the request is refused." That's the true spirit of FOI in action.

As it happens I was not the only one having trouble getting documents from the AFP. Counsel assisting the Eastman inquiry repeatedly complained that getting proper or timely responses to subpoenas was like extracting teeth. She complained, with menaces, and only then did the AFP reveal that it was sitting on a trove of 40,000 documents, all of which were handed over. A spread sheet identified each document and how it fitted into the jigsaw. It seemed the AFP FOI branch had not looked very hard. Nor did its investigations reveal, or appear to reveal, any of the 80 or 90 Eastman Inquiry exhibits now on the public record, relevant to my request – even some Lawler statements about, as my request had put it, "his dealings with and meetings with" Klarenbeck.

The fabulous thing about contrived delay is that one does, eventually, get to see just what efforts have been made, and some capacity to see what one is arguing about. The AOIC has recently indicated my appeal has, after 10 months, reached the top of the queue. I am pursuing it, in at least the hope that the commissioner will look at all of the documents, not the menu prepared by the FOI branch.

All things being equal, we can no doubt look to a decision some time in the next millennium. I'm pretty confident I can fit in a six-week holiday from tomorrow without missing out on much activity.