Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

The coalition opposes this bill, but I do want to make some remarks about the contribution of the previous speaker, the member for Sturt. It was a thoughtful contribution. I respect her as a lawyer and I absolutely admire some of the points that she put across based on her experience in that law firm. When she mentioned the vexatious and speculative freedom of information request based on rumour, misinformation and innuendo, she was 100 per cent right. The member for Sturt was absolutely spot on, so thank you for those very wise words.

Having said all that, you'd wonder why I would then say that we are opposing the bill, but we are, and I will tell you why in the contribution that I will make. I want to hark on the facts that the member for Sturt put forward in relation to my three-and-one-third years in cabinet as the Deputy Prime Minister and as the Minister for Infrastructure, Transport and Regional Development. At the time, I oversaw a $110 billion—110 thousand million dollars—rollout for projects, programs and infrastructure across this nation. They were heady times. We got a lot done. Yet, most of the FOI request that came to my office and to the departments in that time were from the Labor Party. They were. They were generally from the chairs of committees. Some of them were from joint select committees. I had the member for Grayndler as the infrastructure shadow. I had the member for Ballarat as a shadow for some time. Rest assured, you knew when stakeholder groups were being primed and prompted by those two formidable members of parliament; it just jumped out at you from the pages of the FOIs you received.

I had the department spend an inordinate amount of time going through the many FOI requests that were conspired and inspired by the Australian Labor Party. Not only did it cause a lot of angst and wasted time; it also chewed up considerable energy in my office. You should ask what you would rather have your public servants do. Should they be shuffling papers, doing FOI responses, or should they be getting on with developing programs, policies and project ideas that may build an even better nation? I know what I would prefer.

That's not to say that some of the FOI requests, as the member for Sturt quite articulately and eloquently described, aren't vexatious, because they are. Deputy Speaker Wilkie, you would know this. I know you're very much about giving whistleblowers all the protections that they need, and I very much respect the role that you have played in that in your 15 years of service to this parliament and to this nation. I do. I genuinely mean that. But this isn't just about whistleblowers. This is also about, as the member for Sturt said, getting through some of those voluminous in-trays of FOI requests which, quite frankly, in many cases, are a try-on.

I appreciate we have two new members here in the chamber, the members for Bass and Moore. One day I hope you're ministers. I genuinely do—a long way off! Hopefully, we're back in government in 2028. But you're both young. You've both got time. When you are ministers, you will understand what I mean. You do get a lot of requests, and a lot of those requests are just try-ons, usually from the other side of politics.

I don't mind mentioning this: I thought the Prime Minister gave such a good answer in question time the other day that I texted him. He said that in some instances—and I don't think I'm speaking out of school, but, if I am, I'm sure he will rap me on the knuckles!—it is becoming unworkable because it is bogging down government and bogging down the processes of government.

I didn't have the crossbench, but the Prime Minister does, and the crossbench brings another level of requests—and this is not a reflection on you, Deputy Speaker Wilkie. I'm talking about the teals. Please know that. The crossbench adds another level of requests. In my next life, I will come back as a teal. I want to be a pontificator, and I want to be pious and perfect every time on every issue. I do want to be that person. At the moment, I just get complaints brought against me from everybody on Facebook and Twitter—my goodness, X!

The point I'm making is that transparency is important, but we also need to try and work through what are just vexatious, what are just based on fallacies and fantasies from the internet and what are just political try-ons and then what are genuine attempts to uncover something that needs to be exposed, that absolutely needs to be out in the public domain.

I'm not so sure that placing a charge on this is right, as the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025 would have us do and would have us believe. This is where I will differ from the member for Sturt: it is a tax on truth. The difficulty that I have with that particular part of this legislation is that the people who put these vexatious and 'speculative'—to use the member for Sturt's word—FOIs in have deep pockets and are sometimes bankrolled by organisations that would waste the government's time. People who I know are genuine—some of those people I know Deputy Speaker Wilkie is passionate about—who just want something to be exposed because they can see a wrong and want it put right, don't have deep pockets. They don't have, quite frankly, the time and the money that this legislation would put into law.

There is a lot to unpack in this legislation. But the difficulty I have with it—and I am a former journalist and a former newspaper editor—is that there is a public right to know, and this is clamping down on that. I've also been the second in charge, and sometimes acted as the person in charge, of national security, and I know the sorts of things that come across that table at times. This is where you and I, Deputy Speaker Wilkie, might disagree. You haven't been at that table. Sometimes the public doesn't have a right to know until the 30 years have passed, when everything becomes obvious and is made free. You sometimes do have information that is a potential threat to this nation, and you don't want to have runs on banks and panic and people, quite frankly, setting their hair on fire about something that won't happen but potentially could happen.

I have always believed that the government of the day, the Prime Minister and the Deputy Prime Minister have always had the nation's best interest at heart; I do. Again, we'll agree to disagree, but that's why I do believe that they should have the ability to send the nation to war and to send troops into action. They shouldn't have to come back to the parliament, because imagine that sort of ability being held up by the Greens political party, or even the teals, because the teals, quite frankly, are often Independents masquerading as Greens or, the other way around—take your pick—Greens masquerading as Independents. These are important discussions that we need to have as a parliament and as a nation.

The Freedom of Information Amendment Bill proposes to require FOI requests to be made with applicant identification, banning anonymous or pseudonymous requests. There are two ways of looking at that. Sometimes people who are making those requests can't be in the public domain for all manner of reasons, and I get that. This is drawing a long bow, but it is a point. I notice that, increasingly, even in the football lists in the local park competitions that exist around my electorate, you'll get a lot of players who can't be identified. They just appear as 'private player' on these lists, with an asterisk after their name, even if they've kicked five goals or been best on field—that's in the men's and the women's footy competitions—because they don't want their former intimate partners or somebody else knowing who they are, where they live, where they're playing or what they're doing. This is part and parcel of modern society, and modern society has changed a lot from the days when I was a newspaper editor, mainly through the 1990s.

The bill also introduces a discretionary 40-hour cap on processing FOI requests, to limit agency workload. Good luck with that. I know that it burdens public servants when they get these requests. What I would like to see, as I said before, is public servants sharing the workload. They have to do all of the workload. They do enough already. I've said on a number of occasions in this place that I admire the work that public servants do. I do. I always want that to be known. They do a great job. They're often criticised. You'll often hear about the bloated bureaucracy and all the rest, but public servants do a mighty job for this nation and don't always get the credit they deserve. Sometimes they really have to be able to do the work that the government requests of them, not just follow through on FOIs.

The bill allows the Australian Information Commissioner to remit review applications to agencies for reconsideration. As I said, there a lot of things in this bill that would improve efficiency. The charging of a fee disturbs me. It worries me; it really does. I think the bill ignores key recommendations from the 2020 Senate inquiry. I often wonder why House of Representatives members sometimes scratch their head and wonder and worry about what the Senate gets up to. The Senate inquiries play a really important part in improving legislation and in getting the answers to issues put to them. In relation to ignoring the key recommendations, it's particularly on resourcing timeframes and cultural issues within the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. It does impose new barriers, such as fees and the ban on anonymous requests. It reduces access and discourages legitimate applicants. You can look at that either way.

I know the Attorney-General and others have put a ruler over this. They've really looked at this particular legislation, trying to jump ahead and see the unintended consequences, which aren't always obvious when governments put bills in. I know that's why we have an amendment process. That's why we have Senate inquiries. That's why sometimes we have to bring bills back and change them. Sometimes the unintended consequences are worse than what the minister thinks as they're putting bills before the parliament. Even the bureaucrats just don't often realise everything that could evolve as a result of a bill going before the parliament and getting royal assent by the Governor-General.

It expands the grounds for refusing information, especially through new broad exemptions on cabinet and deliberative processes. I have been on about this, about the cabinet. There has to be a certain amount of secrecy with cabinet. Pardon this, Independent; it might be an idea to block your ears for a minute. Independents will never get that. They just won't, because they'll never be around the cabinet table. They'll always make a big song and dance when they go out in the public and go out in the media about the fact that they're running the show. Well, they're not. The cabinet does do the administrative hard yards for and on behalf of the government, for and on behalf of the parliament and for and on behalf of the people. That's the Westminster system. I applaud and admire that. It's served us well since 1901, and may it long continue. We can't have Independents running the show. I mean, they're a rabble—the teals, particularly. I'm glad you can't interject on me, Deputy Speaker Wilkie, but I mean that with all good intentions, having sat around those cabinet tables. But this bill needs a lot of work, and we don't agree with it. (Time expired)

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