It would be folly for the government to deny that freedom of information exemptions are misunderstood and misused, not least of all by the officials tasked with implementing them.
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Poor and inconsistent decisions have created an opening for journalists, researchers and non-government senators to attribute bigger forces at work.
"Rather than a culture of transparency, we have a culture of secrecy in our government agencies," declared an ABC submission to a recent press freedom inquiry. The broadcaster joined with the Walkey Foundation and other media outlets to call for FOI reform.
Officials can pick easy holes in blanket statements of a culture of secrecy, or widespread abuse of FOI process technicalities to prevent political embarrassment.
For example, Information Commissioner Angelene Falk's own reviews of FOI decisions are published online - every one of them. It's clear that misuse of exemptions is happening, but it's not uniform across agencies and usually it's for the very mundane reason that decision-makers don't understand the exemptions themselves. Not exactly the plot of Secret City.
It's not disingenuous claims of national security that block most requests, but an overcorrection out of fear of damaging the integrity of a tender or unintentionally causing a personal privacy breach. This is confirmed by FOI data that Ms Falk collected from agencies.
Government is yet to have its reckoning between the conflicting principles of the public's right to know what public institutions are doing and individual's right to personal privacy.
Every agency has their own horror story of a privacy breach that lingers long after the offending official has moved on, but nobody is ever punished for failing to release information in the public interest.
Why introduce risk when those are the potential range of consequences? Little wonder that agencies are slapping on any exemption they think will make it past an internal review.
These factors are significant contributors to why there are so many FOI cases waiting a review by Ms Falks' office.
Longstanding calls for reducing the cost and delays in releasing documents through FOI have resulted in a movement towards proactive release of information from government. Ms Falk suggests this may be why more applications were withdrawn last year.
Harley Dennett
Former federal politics bureau chief for the Canberra Times, via a career that's taken me from rural Victoria to Washington DC. Telling the stories of my local LGBTI community brought me to political journalism, where I've covered eight budgets, four national elections in two countries, Defence, public service and international governance.
Former federal politics bureau chief for the Canberra Times, via a career that's taken me from rural Victoria to Washington DC. Telling the stories of my local LGBTI community brought me to political journalism, where I've covered eight budgets, four national elections in two countries, Defence, public service and international governance.
