This Thursday 5 March, the Australian parliament is set to consider the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025.
The changes to the bill largely focus on three key areas:
- Preventing anonymous or proxy requests for information (s 12)
- Expanding the scope of what documents will remain hidden (s 369)
- Introducing application fees for freedom-of-information (FOI) requests (s 25)
Identifiable Requests
In forcing applicants to reveal their identity, the thinking is that this would reduce the occurrence of vexatious requests, but unfortunately there is no admission that this would also constrain the toolset available to whistleblowers and investigative journalists.
If departments get to see who is requesting their embarrassing records of malfeasance, these departments will be able to more easily carry out retribution. Some might feel this fear is overblown, but doesn’t it at least warrant a mention as a tradeoff that’s being made?
Expanded Secrecy
In terms of hiding documents, the current rules around FOI requests allow Cabinet to keep its discussions confidential, partly to enforce a principle of collective ministerial responsibility (s 368) − this would break if records revealed which specific person made an unpopular decision. But the new laws would also shield documents prepared for consideration by Cabinet.
As Bernard Keane writes for Crikey, it’s here that the new FOI rules veer in completely the opposite direction to what was recommended in the Robodebt royal commission: that had cabinet documents been made available through FOI requests, the whole sordid affair could have been revealed much sooner.
Keane credits Gordon De Brouwer, the former Public Service Commissioner, for trying to explain away this paradox. De Brouwer explained that staff would be hesitant to provide “frank and honest advice”, if it could theoretically become public. For whatever reason, being on the public record would mean they’d only be prepared to provide useless waffling? Because this would be better for their reputation?
If staff are hesitant to be named as the one who merely mentioned the possibility of some particular course of action (which cabinet might then choose to pursue), then this idea of redacting identifying information is already being addressed in section 52.
Imposing Fees
In introducing application fees, the justification is that the fees allow “managing resourcing pressures in the FOI system”. It’s admitted that the existence of a fee “may unintentionally limit access to information for certain persons.” The key word here is unintentionally − why would any government intentionally limit access to information? Who would do that?
The whole idea of an application fee reduces the incentive for the government to do better. If FOI requests are proving to be cumbersome for government staff, then it’s a sign that they need better technology and processes. By capping FOI work at 40 hours per request (s 181) and by charging applicants for making the requests, departments feel less burdened and hence lose their desire to innovate.
It’s worth giving some perspective to the volume of FOI applications being processed at the moment − in Q4 2025, there were 118 FOI requests received. Is this really an unmanageable load? Something that requires the suppression of civil liberties?
Notice too that when browsing around the site for the Australian Information Commissioner, there are only two applicants listed as vexatious − how are potential applicants supposed to know if their own requests are to be considered “vexatious” when there is such a limited sample set available?
Further examples can be found on the website of the Australasian Legal Information Institute, but that is not a government department, it’s a service hosted by the University of Technology Sydney.
The background to the bill claims that the FOI requests in 2023-24 imposed a processing cost of $86.2M and that changes to technology can be attributed part of the blame for “enabling large volumes of vexatious, abusive and frivolous requests”.
It’s in this context of fighting back that section 125 allows for multiple requests to be considered in aggregate, as if duplicate requests must necessarily be the result of plotting and scheming by gangs of vexatious applicants. The occurrence of multiple, equivalent requests could simply be because there were multiple citizens who independently came to the conclusion that the government was unreasonably hiding details about a topic important to the public.
Would applicants even know they’re making duplicate requests? When the government responds to an FOI request, where is this to be found? We should be putting more thought into why government information is generally so hard to find, and why governments aren’t adopting the same technological advances as the vexatious applicants. And why is the hosting of important legal documents being palmed off to a university? Isn’t this a responsibility of government?
Conclusion
Especially with the recent advances in large language models (LLMs), it’s easy to imagine a streamlined software system that enables more reliable decisions and faster turnaround times for FOI requests. The Information Commissioner could follow the lead of the Australian Taxation Office in adopting AI so as to reduce the “sweatshop” conditions of their call centre, which was criticised for poor service and inconsistent advice.
It’s totally plausible to have an FOI system which leverages AI to group similar requests together and which spots vexatious requests or malicious messages before they ever reach human staff.
The Fusion Party recommends taking a digital-first, transparent approach to the operation of government and recommends against measures that stifle citizens’ rights to information. We recommend removing the application fee, and keeping documents prepared for cabinet subject to FOI. We recommend rejecting the bill in its current form.