David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Finally, we're going to see the end—a nice, clean, peaceful and non-violent killing of Labor's Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025. It's going to go into the dustbin that it should never have been pulled out of in the first place. It is extraordinary that the Labor government has taken so long to not just read this room but read the Australian public.

When the Australian public heard the spiel that came out of the Labor Party when they announced their so-called FOI reforms and they heard, 'The system's been overwhelmed by Russian bots that are trying it take down the FOI system,' the public then said, 'Show us the evidence.' We said, 'Show us the evidence.' We asked the department to show us the evidence. There is no evidence. It turns out there are no Russian bots trying to break the FOI system.

The number of lies that Labor has told about the rationale for their FOI campaign is equivalent to Trumpian levels. There have been false arguments. They said about a million hours of bureaucrats' time was spent dealing with FOIs. That's actually one of their claims that I believe, because I've seen how many hours bureaucrats spend blacking out information, coming up with reasons to refuse information, desperately trying to work out what the minister would or wouldn't want produced and then blacking out everything else. I don't doubt a million hours has been spent under Labor desperately trying to prevent information being put on the record through FOI. But the answer to that is to change the culture.

If you really want an answer to FOI backlogs, maybe read the first five provisions of the act, because what they say is that you shouldn't have to wait for people to make applications; the government should be transparent and should be proactively publishing this information. Imagine if we had a searchable online database of government information that people could go to that was freely provided by the government and that would be consistent with the FOI Act. Imagine how many FOI applications would not have to be made because people could get access to government information, which, at the end of the day, is not owned by the Labor Party or the coalition. Government information is owned by the Australian public.

This bill was always an attack on truth—putting in application fees and cost barriers to get information. It was about hiding government information through expanding cabinet-in-confidence provisions. It was about putting caps on processing claims and saying, 'If it is going to take us more than X hours to black out and come up with reasons to refuse your claim, we won't even process it in the first place'. The more important the claim, the more likely it was to be failed under these bills. With the way in which the government introduced this bill without talking to anyone in civil society, without having an open process, and they just brought in their bill, their thought bubble, maybe they thought the coalition would just jump on board. I'll be frank, the coalition was pretty rotten on secrecy, and I thought it had set a new low bar for secrecy under the Morrison government, with secret cabinets appointments and how hard it was to get information out. They were pretty bad. To their credit, Labor has actually excelled at one thing. They have excelled at being even worse on secrecy than the Morrison coalition government. I wouldn't have thought it were possible, but you have managed to win that contest—the most secret government that we have seen in generations.

I really want to thank my team, who have done a great deal of work. I want to thank all of those non-government members of this chamber who have joined together united against this, but I especially want to thank the Centre for Public Integrity for their incredible work in this space—the analysis that they have done about just how broken this bill is and about how it backs in government secrecy and excludes the public from having basic access to information. I think their analysis has been extraordinary. It's been important. It's one of the reasons the government is walking away with its tail between its legs and withdrawing its own bill today. I want to thank the Human Rights Law Centre and all of those other NGOs who have come out and backed in the public's right to know.

What should the government now do? The government should now rethink this entire strategy. They should come out with a white paper, a discussion paper. They should enter into a public open consultation about what's wrong with the FOI system, what's right with the FOI system and how we go about reforming it. They should do it in the full glare of public consultation. They should then genuinely assess that white paper and come back with a set of reforms that makes the FOI system works. Yes, the FOI system is broken, but it is not broken for any of the reasons Labor says. It's broken because this government, like the one before it, is still addicted to secrecy. (Time expired)