THE longer a government stays in power the more secretive it gets – simply because it has more things to hide. 
Some further evidence for this proposition emerged last week with the release of the Information Commissioner’s report on charges under the Freedom of Information Act. More of that anon.
The commissioner, Professor John McMillan, produced a splendid graph in his report showing the number of FOI requests and their cost each year since the Act was first passed nearly 30 years ago.
The graph shows that costs are getting out of control and that users of FOI pay a mere two per cent of the costs – a great piece of myth-debunking. Most journalists, I am fairly sure, imagine that government agencies slap high demands for fees upon FOI applicants just to deter those pesky journalists from putting their noses where they are not wanted.
Of course, it is another example of distortion by truth. Over the years every example of demands for high fees has received enormous publicity especially if the demands were made of the media. But the thousands of cases of information provided for free do not get publicity.
Even though every media article about high fees was utterly accurate, the overall impression given by the media coverage of massive FOI fees has distorted the truth.
Overall, FOI has cost nearly half a billion dollars since the Act came into force. One can only hope that the value of the information released and its effect on public administration has been worth it.
In any event, McMillan argued, we must get more efficient at the process of delivering government information. It is, after all, a valuable resource.
In doing so he produced this interesting graph. From 1982-83 the number of requests shot up, as you would expect with a new regime. Then they fell steadily until around 1990 when the Hawke-Keating Government slowly aged and with the ageing came more mistakes, idiocies and malfeasance to cover up. The sports rorts affair and other scandalous wastages of public money got people’s back up and public-interest groups, journalists and others got more active with FOI to prise the Government’s secrets open.
Requests exploded from 23,500 in 1989-90 to 40,000 in the dying year of the Keating Government.
Then Honest John came to power with promises of an end to jobs for the boys and spending taxpayers money to advertise party wares. FOI requests immediately plummeted by 25 per cent to 30,000. In the next 11 years FOI requests slowly increased with a couple of minor dips to 41,000 in the year before honest, open-government Kevin 07 rode the white horse into the Lodge.
In the Howard years, the rural and regional rorts affair, the expansion – not contraction – of taxpayer-funded party propaganda, and other government follies and malfeasance drove a demand for more openness and FOI requests went up.
With the election of Rudd FOI requests plummeted again to 22,000. Rudd had promised more open government. Three years later major changes were made to FOI, particularly removing the $30 fee for making a request and requests have bounced back a little to 24,000.
Now, maybe other factors have driven the fluctuations in the number of FOI requests, but there is a correlation, if not a causative link, between the staleness of a government and the number of FOI requests. I hasten to add that McMillan’s graph showed this by pure serendipity and that the graph was produced to illustrate other unrelated information.
Of equal import, was the real intention of the graph – to show that the costs to taxpayers of FOI are significant and growing.
In 2003-04 the acme year for FOI requests – 42,600 – the average cost per request was about $475. Last financial year the 23,600 requests cost an average of $1540 per request – more than a threefold increase.
So much for computerisation making things cheaper, quicker and easier.
McMillan’s target is the very large, costly FOI requests, many done by litigants in place of more restrictive court discovery processes or by journalists going digging.
The trouble is that governments do not like giving out documents which might embarrass them. So unless a journalist has been tipped off about the existence of a document they can identify with precision there is often no other way to get to the documents which reveal malfeasance than by the ambit claim.
And the secretiveness stretches beyond embarrassment. Some governments, and the present one is an example, want to hold back information and documents until they have had a chance to marshal their responses and defences.
It leads to bad administration and bad policy.
Three examples come to mind. The Government sat on the Henry report for four months before releasing it at the same time as its response – no public debate, no discussion, no testing of the options. The Government could have saved itself a lot of grief if it had released the report immediately and listened to the arguments.
It sat on the ADFA-Skype report for four months so that Defence Minister Stephen Smith could fudge and worm instead of acknowledging that he acted precipitously and apologising. The net result is a deterioration of the relationship between the military and the minister.
And now we have the Health Services Union report from Fairwork Australia. If that process had been more open from the beginning, Craig Thompson might never have stood in the 2010 election.
Secrecy ultimately catches up with a government. The public gets increasingly suspicious and vote it out.
A better policy would be to be far more open so the public could see how difficult government is and be more understanding of error.
McMillan is proposing a more informal administrative process where people can ask for information without setting up the legally enforceable deadlines in the FOI regime. People dissatisfied with that could then use FOI. Any FOI request that required more than 40 hours work could be refused.
A new indexed costs scale would apply — a bit more generous for routine FOI than the present one.
His plans have some merit. He argues that government is more open now so it should work. But until governments routinely and promptly publish material without being asked, getting information from government will continue to be an unnecessarily costly exercise when the internet and computerization should have made it cheaper and easier.
CRISPIN HULL
This article first appeared in The Canberra Times on Saturday 7 April 2012.