By CRISPIN HULL
AT LEAST the Treasury is taking the new law and policy on Freedom of Information seriously – and cunningly. So seriously and cunningly, indeed, that FOI applicants are dismayed.
Let’s face it FOI applications fall into three classes: individuals wanting to see what documents the bureaucracy holds about them; oppositions wanting to embarrass governments; and journalists wanting to get information that other media outlets have not got so they can run “exclusive” stories.
If, as a side effect, important information of public consequence gets published, so much the better.
In the past couple of weeks Treasury has released documents about the carbon tax and the national broadband network that would not have been released under the FOI regime run by the Howard Government.
Under that regime Ministers could issue “conclusive certificates” that it would not be in the public interest to release documents (even if those documents had been produced with taxpayers’ money and any goose could see they were about matters of major public importance).
Hence in the late 1990s, then Treasurer Peter Costello issued a conclusive certificate saying that it would not be in the public interest for the public to know about Treasury advice on the Government’s proposed boost to the first home buyer’s scheme. Treasury, we assume, said it only increase demand a people lined up for the freebie and prices would rise higher than the grant, making first home buyers worse off. It was Economics 101.
As it happened most media commentators saw through the Costello ruse and he was derided.
Under Labor’s new FOI regime Treasury is now taking a smarter tack. Conclusive certificates have gone. The onus is now on the Government to show that the release would not be in the public interest. This time it was the Opposition seeking access to documents about the cost of any proposed carbon tax on household expenditure.
Even under the new FOI Act Treasury could probably have made a legalistic case about why the documents should not be released. But it knew it would invite accusations of “you’ve got something to hide”.
So it just released a swag of documents.
But it did so in a very intelligent – even cunning — way. Under the new FOI regime, government agencies which release documents under the FOI Act are required to put those documents on the agency website within 10 days.
So what did Treasury do? Well, it had decided on a policy of simultaneous delivery. At the same time it released to the Opposition it put the documents on the publicly available section of its website. And it did so at a critical time – on a Friday afternoon.
It meant major newspapers could put the story into their major Saturday editions. We can safely assume that news outlets are not constantly scanning Treasury’s FOI website and that someone told them the carbon documents were there.
In any event, all the news organisations had immediate access to the documents at the same time as the Opposition and at a time when the vast majority of Opposition staffers had packed it in for the week and at a time when most media outlets are abuzz with activity – Friday afternoon.
So the Coalition lost its “scoop” and lost the opportunity to spin a story out of the documents and provide them exclusively just to favoured journalists who would go along with the anti-government story – usually those from News Ltd publications, particularly The Australian.
The Coalition has done this for years – whether in Government of Opposition – put out a bowl of information cream for the cats, so they will come back purring next week.
This time ithe Treasury snookered them. Yes, The Australian ran a typically anti-Labor line – “Households face $863 carbon tax slug” – but it was softened by more impartial media like the ABC, The Age, The Canberra Times and The Sydney Morning Herald, which reported that household-expenditure effects of the carbon tax would be minimal given the compensation proposals, but that the higher price of carbon would be a powerful incentive for people to use less of it. Indeed, with restraint on carbon use many would be better off.
The Opposition must be bitterly disappointed at having lost the propaganda war on that one.
I suspect a similar thing will happen with an FOI request on the National Broadband Network, but at the time of writing it is yet to play out.
It may be that the Opposition and journalists will not bother with FOI requests if they are not going to be able to score political points or scoops.
Is it a sign that Labor, the Labor minority Government and the federal bureaucracy are getting more media savvy? I think so.
What about this for a line of thought? It is fine for the media to hold a government accountable, issue by issue, on the merits, but that is different from a relentless campaign against a government highlighting and magnifying every slight thing that goes wrong or might go wrong so that overall a misleading impression of incompetence is built up.
That is what The Australian has done over the past four years. It has given undue prominence to minor errors and has run unjustified scare campaigns against new policy in order to turn voters against Labor – it has been a Coalition campaigner more than an impartial media scrutiniser. It has been a campaigner against the carbon tax, the mining tax, investment in schools, the national broadband network and a whole raft of Labor policies.
It has been a relentless campaigner against the Independents supporting the Government.
It invites a campaign back.
Now, I have no knowledge of this, but you could imagine that a government with an arm as internet-savvy as the Treasury (evidenced by its FOI management) might think: We are pretty good at advertising our wares (including FOI documents) on the internet. Why do we need to advertise our jobs or tenders or other government matters in newspapers? In particular, why do we need to do that advertising in a national newspaper when we have a national website for every government department?
Why couldn’t we have a federal government jobs and tender website and not run or pay for any advertising in any News Ltd newspaper? We might continue to advertise in local newspapers for local tenders and local jobs, however.
True, a government might seek the eyes of people who are not job-seeking and will not go to a jobs website to think about changing jobs. But why do that in The Australian which does not have a very big circulation, and in any event has a circulation among people with political views you might not want to employ in the upper echelons of your public service? And which is part of a worldwide media empire which does not stop at widespread illegal phone tapping to get its “news” – much of which runs in its Australian outlets?
Just a thought.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on 16 April 2011.
Crispin you are on to something here but I think there is more to this. But first a few corrections. You can safely assume that journalists ARE scanning the Treasury FOI site everyday. We have quickly learned to check it regularly. However, if this phenomenon had anything to do with Labor becoming more savvy then they would be doing a few more other things right than they are currently are.
I think this is all down to Treasury becoming more media savvy or more savvy in the way they get information into the public domain. First, as you have pointed out, they are denying outlets “exclusives” and the opportunity to selectively use the information they obtain by FoI. There have even been a number of cases where the applicant has only found out the information has been released when they read about it the next day. It is completely disencentivising journos to make FoIs when they know their competitors will have it at exactly the same time.
But there maybe another reason. I am beginning to wonder whether Treasury is using FoI to shape public debate and influence Government through the media rather than in confidence. This is of course completely counter to the way in which public servants have traditionally provided advice. But think about it- if their masters pay more attention to what’s in the media why not use it in the same way that vested interests do to get their message through to Government ? I first started thinking about this when Treasury took the unprecedented step of just releasing it’s incoming brief soon after Labor was re-elected last year. Here was a party that had stupidly dumped the CPRS and promised at the election not to introduce a carbon tax. Treasury advice to reconsider that strategy was a lot harder to ignore when it was all over the papers. Perhaps we are seeing a realization in the public service that freedom of information and transparency have some things going for it.
Just a thought.
Marcus Priest (AFR)