Aaron Violi (Casey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I must admit it's nice that the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025 has returned to the House today. The manager saw the light. The member for Fisher's speech yesterday no doubt convinced him that we needed to move the bill from the Federation Chamber back to the House. It is wonderful that the Manager of Opposition Business and the member for Fisher were able to convince the government to bring this bill back where it belongs—in the House.

This is an important bill when we look at freedom of information, democracy and the rights of our citizens, our media and our community to hold the government and parliamentarians to account. This is one of the fundamental challenges we face as a democracy—how we make sure we protect democracy by holding the government and the executive to account.

I want to quote a member of this House, a member of this parliament, who has been in this parliament for a very long time. They entered this parliament in 1996, so they will have seen a lot of the Australian journey and democracy. They said:

At a time where we have a global contest between democratic systems and authoritarianism, we need to do all within our power to ensure that our great democracy is trusted; that our politicians, our public servants are accountable; and that there is faith in the processes that overwhelmingly are conducted in good faith with people of integrity, with people who are honest.

Those are fine words indeed. Who delivered those fine words? It was the Prime Minister of Australia, the Hon. Anthony Albanese. This is another example of the Prime Minister saying one thing when he was in opposition and doing the complete opposite when in government. We've seen the continual degradation of transparency and accountability by this Prime Minister. Freedom of information is so important—to whistleblowers, to the Australian public and to the media—holding the executive to account.

But the Prime Minister did not stop there. He went on to articulate the very principles that he claimed define his government. He stated:

… the health of our democracy depends on the integrity of our institutions and the transparency and the fairness of our laws, and because the trust that is generated by that accountability and transparency helps to build national cohesion, bringing the country together, overcoming divides, finding common ground.

He concluded this assertion by affirming that integrity, transparency, accountability and fairness are 'the principles that drive the government that I'm proud to lead'. Now, let's hold those words up—trust, accountability, transparency and integrity—against the grim reality of the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025. As my mum used to say to me, 'It's not what you say; it's what you do.' The Prime Minister has a dismal record of saying one thing and doing another.

This is not a blueprint for a stronger, more prosperous Australia built on trust. It is a monument to bureaucratic control and ministerial secrecy. It is the height of hypocrisy for the Prime Minister to preach about trust and accountability in the contest between democracy and authoritarianism, only to introduce a bill that actively entrenches secrecy and weakens the public's right to know. I wonder what those on the backbench of the government really think about this bill. I can imagine the speeches they would deliver if they were in opposition and it was the Morrison government or any coalition government that had delivered this bill. We should remind those members of the backbench that, in our democratic system, even though they might be in the same party as the executive, they too have a responsibility to hold the executive to account.

So let's look closely at what this bill proposes to do and why it thoroughly violates the spirit of transparency that the Prime Minister championed. The bill makes major changes to the Freedom of Information Act 1982 and the Australian Information Commissioner Act 2010. The coalition stands opposed to this bill in the House, the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025, because it fundamentally weakens the rights of citizens to scrutinise government actions and reverses four decades of progress towards open government. The proposed changes are extensive, spread across nine schedules, and each schedule represents a fresh barrier erected between the government and the people it serves.

Firstly, let's consider schedule 1, which rewrites the objects of the act. This change signals the government's true intention, by prioritising the proper functioning of government over the public's right to access information. When the objectives of the law shift from facilitating access to protecting government machinery, the culture of secrecy is immediately validated.

Secondly, and perhaps most dangerous, is schedule 2, which bans anonymous requests. The bill requires FOI requests to be made with applicant identification, thereby banning anonymous or pseudo-anonymous requests. This provision is a direct attack on courage and integrity. It ends protection for whistleblowers, for advocates and for citizens who fear reprisal from their government or their employers. By silencing whistleblowers and vulnerable applicants, the government strips away the protection of those who fear retaliation. This is not building trust; this is instilling fear. We have pledged to retain anonymity and protect whistleblowers, because true accountability requires mechanisms that shield the brave individuals who speak truth to power.

Thirdly, this bill introduces a punitive mechanism designed to discourage all but the most well-resourced applicants: the truth tax. Schedule 6 creates application fees for FOI requests and reviews, except for requests concerning personal information. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner will now be engaged to charge these fees, and, by imposing application fees and processing caps, Australians will have to pay for access to information that already belongs to them. This imposition of new barriers through fees is nothing less than a tax on transparency and severely reduces access to legitimate applications. This measure is designed to choke off access and reduce investigative journalism. I must say, given the work that Nick McKenzie and the Age have done when it comes to investigative journalism into the CFMEU and the links to the Australian Labor Party, we can see why this government wants to make it harder for investigative journalism to thrive in our country. The coalition will ensure any new fees are subject to parliamentary disallowance.

The barriers do not end with fees. Schedule 3 introduces a discretionary 40-hour cap of processing FOI requests. This cap allows agencies to stop searching once a request is deemed too difficult, effectively limiting agency workload and allowing them to simply abandon complex inquiries. Coupled with this cap, schedule 4 extends decision timeframes from 30 calendar days to 30 working days. Agencies already breech the FOI timeframes. Extending them will only make this system slower and less accountable, rewarding delay and dysfunction. The coalition stands ready to hold the government accountable for undermining transparency, but the mechanisms introduced in this bill make that essential work exponentially harder.

The Prime Minister spoke of ensuring faith in processes, yet this bill attempts to cloak the very heart of government decision-making in new layers of secrecy. Schedule 7 dramatically expands exemptions especially around cabinet and deliberative documents, making refusals significantly easier. New clauses allow agencies to block access to any document that describes or refers to cabinet material. Furthermore, they allow the classification of factual briefs as deliberative documents, keeping them hidden from the public eye. The expansion of cabinet and deliberative processes exemptions makes it easier to refuse requests without even searching for documents. Given we have the recent example of FOIs showing the Australian people that power prices will go up under this government, it is no wonder this government want to shield the Australian people from their incompetence and their mismanagement. That doesn't make it right.

This move expands ministerial and bureaucratic secrecy. Australians will now see only announcements, never the critical debates that led to them. This prevents Australians from forming informed opinions about their government. When you limit what citizens can know, you fundamentally limit what they can decide. Schedule 5 changes information commissioner review processes in a way that limits third-party participation, and schedule 8 allows a different minister or agency to respond if the original minister leaves office, clarifying that FOI responses can be provided by successive ministers or agencies. These are not merely technical provisions. They add complexity and reduce consistency, ensuring that new thresholds, exemptions and caps will lead to more disputes, more appeals and less transparency.

The opposition is not alone in its condemnation of this bill. The government claims it will modernise the FOI framework and improve efficiency, but the reality is that it weakens the public's right to know, entrenches secrecy and reduces accountability. The bill lacks public support. Every major integrity and transparency body has condemned this bill. None support it. Media and civil society are warning of increased costs and impeded investigative journalism. Apart from the bureaucrats who stand to benefit from reduced workloads and increased control, this bill does not have a friend in the world. This bill has been rushed. It was introduced without consultation, it ignored the 2023 Senate FOI inquiry, and it has not advanced any credible national security reasons for it.

The reality is that we know this bill has been introduced because, despite what the Prime Minister says, he wants to shield the Australian people from his incompetence. He wants to shield the Australian people from their ability to understand the failures of this government, and the failures of this government are many. Energy prices are up 40 per cent under this government despite them promising to reduce power bills by $275. Interest rates are up under this government. Inflation is out of control under this government. They continue to fail, and all they can do is not solve the problems of the Australian people but seek to hide from scrutiny of the Australian people.

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