The agency charged with keeping and sharing the nation's memory has spent more than $850,000 in legal fees fighting applications to access archival government documents over the last two years, even as it has had repeated funding cuts.
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And in one case the Attorney-General has intervened in the National Archives of Australia's High Court battle to keep potentially pivotal documents about the Whitlam dismissal secret.
The archives says it preserves the most secret records of government "so everyone can access evidence of government decisions and actions, making them transparent and accountable", even decades after controversial actions.
But historian Jenny Hocking has taken her case all the way to the High Court after being denied access to letters between Sir John Kerr and the Queen surrounding the Whitlam dismissal.
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Attorney-General Christian Porter has told the court he would intervene in Professor Hocking's case.
"The Attorney-General doesn't intervene on a side but the Commonwealth's interpretation of the law that it will put in the matter is largely consistent with the interpretation put by Archives which, as you would expect, is the conventional interpretation that reflects what has been the accepted constitutional position for the last 119 years," a spokesman for Mr Porter said.
In response to a question by independent Senator Rex Patrick last year, the archive revealed it had spent $926,474 fighting requests for access to documents from the 2015-2016 financial year until May 31, 2018.
A spokesperson told The Sydney Morning Herald and The Age it had ultimately spent $526,628.01 in 2017-18 and $330,824.20 in 2018-19.
"Our expenditure on legal fees is the cost of accountability, not the price of secrecy," the Archives' Director-General David Fricker said. "The National Archives is rightly held to account through the AAT [Administrative Appeals Tribunal] and the courts for the decisions we make, that is as it should be."
A review of the archives, which is expected to report next month, has heard that if the agency does not receive more money, it may be unable to preserve deteriorating documents in its care. It has lost about 10 per cent of its budget each year since 2014.
Historians have told the review it can take years to access archival documents because the archives appear unable to force other agencies, with which it consults, to make decisions on access requests promptly.
The archive is arguing in the Hocking case that the governor-general's communications with the Queen were "personal" in nature.
Labor MP Julian Hill said the records between two of the highest figures in Australia's system of government were plainly not personal communications.
"What are they exchanging recipes or saying, 'Hi love, how's the kids?'," Mr Hill said. "It is astounding the amount of taxpayer money that is being wasted to block the release of what should be public documents."
ANU history Professor Frank Bongiorno said he supported calls for more funding for the archives and had sympathy for its position, but questioned its spending.
"They seem to find the money for fighting court cases or AAT appeals ... and you do wonder sometimes about whether they've quite got their priorities right," Professor Bongiorno said.
- SMH/The Age
