Tom Venning (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Freedom of information isn't a privilege; it's a right that belongs to the Australian people. The documents of government don't belong to ministers or departments; they belong to the people. When Australians ask for information, they are not being difficult. They are exercising their right to know how their government works. That right, one of the most important in our democracy, is what this bill, the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025, puts at risk. The government says this bill will modernise the FOI system, but it does not modernise it; it weakens it. It moves our system from a presumption of openness to a presumption of control. It gives agencies more excuses to say no and gives citizens fewer tools to hold government accountable. That's not reform; that is retreat.

I want to thank my colleagues who have called this bill what it is—a truth tax. Australians will be made to pay more, wait longer and receive less when they simply ask to know what their government is doing. Let's remember what FOI is actually for. It's for journalists to expose waste. It's for community groups to check on decisions that affect them. It's how citizens hold us, their representatives, to account. Remember what 'FOI' stands for—'freedom of information'. It's not 'freedom of information if we feel like it'. If FOI fails, bad decisions multiply in the dark. This government already has a transparency problem, and now, under this bill, even that small window of sunlight will start to close.

In regional Australia, we value straight talk. In Grey, people don't expect perfection from government, but they do expect honesty and openness. They expect to see where their money is being spent. They want to know why a road project in the mid-north has stalled or how decisions about aged care or rural hospitals were made. They want to know why programs are announced but the delivery never seems to reach the Eyre Peninsula, the Yorke Peninsula or the far north. Freedom of information helps us keep that trust alive. It's how the local paper in Port Augusta or Whyalla can ask the hard questions. It's how communities make sure decisions about them are made with them, not for them behind closed doors. That's why this bill matters. It's because, when you shut down transparency, you shut out the people.

Now, let's look at what this bill actually does.

Schedule 1 rewrites the whole purpose of the act. Right now, the law says government information should be released unless there's a good reason for it not to. Under this bill, information will only be released if it is part of the 'proper functioning of government'. That sounds harmless, but it's a huge shift. It gives every department an easy way out: 'Sorry, we cannot release that. It might interfere with our processes.' What a cop-out! It's the kind of language that breeds bureaucracy, not accountability.

Schedule 2 bans anonymous requests. The government claims that that's about protecting national security from bots. That's nonsense. Once a document is released, it's public. Who asked for it doesn't matter, but for the whistleblower, the community advocate, the local journo or the local public servant who spots something wrong, anonymity is protection. Removing it will silence the people who most need it to be heard.

Schedule 3 caps processing times at 40 hours. That's not efficiency; that's a get-out clause. It lets agencies stop searching when things get hard. The big, complex cases, the ones that expose systematic issues, will be the first ones to hit the wall. Imagine a journalist in Balaklava trying to uncover why local job funding fell through or a volunteer group in Port Lincoln asking for correspondence about a fisheries decision. Once that search hits 40 hours, the answer will simply be: 'Too hard. Denied.' That's not accountability; that's called obstruction.

Schedule 4 changes the timeframe from 30 days to 30 working days. That means longer wait times—six weeks instead of four. And that's before you add the usual extensions.

Then there's schedule 7, which quietly expands the cabinet exemption to cover any document that merely refers to cabinet material. That means a department could refuse to search at all, claiming that papers might be related to cabinet. That's not protecting cabinet confidentiality. That's burying anything that might cause political discomfort. It's the difference between keeping deliberations private and hiding inconvenient truths.

This bill does not come in isolation. It fits a pattern, a pattern of control, concealment and centralisation. We've seen it in the refusal to release energy modelling, in the endless redactions on defence and procurement and in the Prime Minister's own handling of his diary. The culture of 'no' is spreading through this government. Right now, we need absolute transparency on energy policy and power prices. This government has not released anything on how much it will cost the country to get to net zero, for example. Some say $8 trillion to $9 trillion. What does that mean for a steelmaker in Whyalla or the worker at the lead smelter in Port Pirie? Their livelihoods are on the line. And regional manufacturing is hitting the wall because of this government's energy policy.

Who loses when transparency dies? It's not ministers and not the big corporates with lawyers and lobbyists. It's the local paper in Port Augusta that cannot afford the new fees. It's the community group in Ceduna trying to trace where regional grants went. It's the citizen in Kimba asking simple questions about infrastructure funding and getting stonewalled by a process. This bill will make it harder and more expensive for those people to participate in their own democracy. Freedom of information should not be a luxury item for those who can pay the most. It should be the ordinary right of every Australian.

This government says this bill is about efficiency. Let's be honest: it is not. Efficiency doesn't come from new excuses to say no. It comes from properly resourcing the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner so it can clear the backlog. I will repeat that: it comes from properly resourcing the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner so it can clear the backlog. It comes from better training, clearer systems and a culture that values transparency instead of fearing it. Right now, there is a stack of unresolved reviews. Applicants wait years. Departments drag things out until a story is cold and the issue is forgotten. That's not efficiency; that is delay by design.

In Grey, people do not have the money or time to fight through red tape to get answers. When a community wants to know why a hospital service was downgraded or why a road repair project fell off the budget, they should be able to ask and get a straight answer. They should not need a lawyer, a lobbyist or a media team to do it. That's what this bill forgets. It treats the public as a nuisance, not a stakeholder. It forgets the power is lent to us by the people, not owned by us. If the government was serious about improving the system, it would take a very different approach.

Here is what genuine reform looks like: keep the law's purpose clear—that information belongs to the people, not to the government; protect anonymity so whistleblowers and citizens can speak without fear; replace the 40-hour cap with a duty to assist so agencies must work with applicants to refine requests, not block them; limit the cabinet exemption to genuine cabinet documents, not every piece of paper that mentions a minister's name; and properly fund the information commissioner so that the system actually works. Those steps will deliver real transparency. They would make government more open, not more opaque.

Freedom of information is meant to make governments uncomfortable. It is meant to hold power to account. That is the point. Governments that fear scrutiny don't trust the people, and, when governments don't trust the people, the people stop trusting government. We already see that distrust growing across the country. People are cynical about politics, frustrated by spin and tired of decisions being made without explanation. If this bill passes, that cynicism will deepen, and the next government will inherit a system even more closed off than before.

Transparency should not be a partisan issue. It is not about left or right; it is about fairness, honesty and accountability. When people can see the facts for themselves, democracy gets stronger. In Grey and right across regional Australia, people expect straight talk and fair play. They expect government to answer questions honestly, even when the answer is uncomfortable. This bill fails that test. It weakens transparency, it increases secrecy and it shifts power further away from the public and into the hands of the bureaucracy.

This parliament should not vote for longer delays, higher costs and wider exemptions. We should vote for openness, honesty and confidence. Freedom of information is not a nuisance; it is a right. It is a right. This bill does the opposite. It narrows it, it entrenches secrecy and it weakens the fundamental rights of Australians to know what their government is doing in their name. This bill represents a profound step backwards for transparency, accountability and open government. The government tells us that this bill will modernise the freedom of information framework, that it will streamline processes and improve efficiencies. But when you read it, when you listen to those who understand the FOI system—journalists, integrity experts, transparency advocates—the truth becomes clear: this bill is about control, not modernisation.

The bill proposes a long list of sweeping changes to the Freedom of Information Act 1982 and the Australian Information Commissioner Act 2010. It would require all FOI requests to include verified identification, banning anonymous requests, and would impose a 40-hour cap on the processing of requests, allowing agencies to simply stop searching if they decided a request was too hard. It would allow new application fees for requests and for reviews, except for personal information, effectively taxing Australians for seeking the truth. It would expand exemptions for cabinet and deliberative documents, making refusals easier and transparency rarer. It would extend the time agencies have to respond from 30 calendar days to 30 working days, further delaying public access, and give the Information Commissioner power to remit reviews back to the very agencies that made the decisions in the first place.

These are not minor procedural tweaks; these are major structural changes to how Australians access information from their government. The coalition will oppose this bill because it strikes at the very heart of democratic accountability.

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