The response by government departments to requests for information about electorate "cheat sheets" by which the differential effect of spending and programs in different electorates has been supplied to political operators is suggestive of a bad conscience about the help that has been provided.
Agencies are fighting hard to avoid issuing the information to public scrutiny, not least by making absurd claims about the time, and expense of examining all the cheat sheets to determine whether they contain any information that might be exempt under the Freedom of Information Act. In some cases the estimates are in the tens of thousands of dollars.
Meanwhile, there is evidence that the use of the information by the Government has gone well beyond making minor boasts in particular electorates about how generous Government has been thanks to the hard-working local member.
Rather, it is being fed into sophisticated computer systems (also maintained, improperly, at public expense thanks to rorts on the members' entitlement system), cross-matched with other data gathered about individual voters, and used in mail-outs and in the devising of advertising strategies. This involves taking the benefits of incumbency in further and more improper directions. But even more disturbing is the way in which public servants are allowing themselves to be used as handmaidens of the process.
There is nothing necessarily wrong about governments wanting to have information about the effects of its decisions on particular electorates. Nor is there any necessary difficulty about using such information to boast about achievements in particular places. Gathering data in this way is useful in the ministerial and administrative decision-making process, and the ability to use it for explicit political purposes is just a by-product. Where it ventures into impropriety is where the information is being plainly gathered for a partisan electoral purpose.
The Government denies any involvement in the fierce resistance to disclosure by different agencies.
That in itself tends to confirm that the purpose for which it was collated by government was not for public information. Minister for Industrial Relations Joe Hockey was disingenuous when he claimed that ministerial offices were quite removed from the consideration of FoI requests, or the proper determination of access and payment considerations.
Perhaps his experience with his department is that it shows such great alacrity in anticipating the Government's wishes that there is no need to pass on his office's "hints". But in many agencies, Freedom of Information requests are these days regarded as falling within the minister's public relations strategy, and are treated as discretions rather than obligations.
Responses are coordinated between agencies with "suggested" words of refusal or discouragement. The message from Government is clear, and not only from what it does but, these days, as much as what it says. Various ministers publicly suggest, quite wrongly, that FoI is not about was never intended to be about accountability. The head of Treasury, whose minister treats the act with contempt, has complained of the difficulties caused by public servants with a duty to protect their minister from embarrassment having to process FoI requests when embarrassment is inevitable.
The Government's operating principles are clear enough: first, it is at its political convenience, not the operation of law, which determines whether information will be given out, and when.
Second, delay, and the threat of massive bills, will be used as weapons to avoid disclosure.
In some cases, mere delay is enough given that the self-imposed regime of scrutinising documents line by line is calculated to take thousands of hours, able to ride the agency out past the election, when (no doubt the agency hopes) the request, its subject matter and the behaviour of the officials involved, will cease to be of interest. It won't, as it happens.
The claiming of extortionate fees, based on fanciful arguments about the care needed to scrutinise materials, is intended to deter and discourage, as is, the argument that since journalists are in the "business" of providing information to the public, they should not be exempt from fees on public interest grounds.
One reason why FoI exists, and why journalists use it, is that the availability of raw information from independent and non-partisan agencies ought to be a check on such political spinning and marketing.
It is harder for this to happen when agencies are so compliant with those for whom information is not a public commodity, but something to be used selectively for partisan purposes, withheld when it suits, and, frequently misrepresented and spun.
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