Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Pursuant to contingent notice, I move:

That so much of the standing orders be suspended as would prevent me moving a motion to provide for the consideration of a matter, namely a motion to allow a motion relating to a discharge of a bill from the Notice Paper to be moved immediately.

And I move:

That the question be now put.

Question agreed to.

Original question agreed to.

I move:

That a motion relating to the discharge of a bill from the Notice Paper may be moved immediately and determined without amendment and that the question be put after 30 minutes of debate, with 5 minutes per speaker.

And I move:

That the question be now put.

Question agreed to.

Original question agreed to.

I move:

That the government business order of the day relating to the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025 be discharged from the Notice Paper.

The government are taking this step because we understand the bill does not have the support of the Senate, and it would not pass the Senate in its current form. But this is an important reform, and the government does remain committed to it. Freedom of information—

Honourable senators interjecting—

Sue Lines (President) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order across the chamber! Seriously, senators.

Katy Gallagher (ACT, Australian Labor Party, Minister for the Public Service) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This is an important reform, and the government remains committed to it. Freedom of information is a vital feature of our democracy, but the way the FOI system is working now is unworkable. The current framework is stuck in the 1980s—before smartphones, before artificial intelligence—and our laws genuinely need to be updated. Last year, public servants spent more than a million hours processing FOIs. We continue to listen to the feedback that we are getting across the parliament, but we do seek to negotiate in good faith to progress this important reform. For example, we previously amended the bill in the House to ensure a person with a legitimate reason for wanting to make an anonymous FOI request, such as a whistleblower, can ask for a member of parliament, journalist, lawyer or friend to make an FOI request for non-personal information on their behalf while maintaining their anonymity.

We have an open mind and will continue to engage on the final form of the important reforms that we will bring back to the parliament to get on with fixing the FOI system, which I think we all agree needs updating. The current bill will be discharged today while we undertake that important work. We are genuinely after reforms that will make the system more efficient and genuine for applicants; protect the safety of public servants, which is incredibly important; save taxpayers money on frivolous and vexatious requests; and ensure our FOI laws cannot be exploited by malicious actors.

I will go through this briefly in the time that is allowed to me. Agencies and ministers received 43,456 FOI requests and finalised 39,390 requests in the 2024-25 financial year—a 20 per cent increase from the year before. In 2024-25, FOI processing was estimated to cost agencies almost $100 million, significantly more than the costs that were experienced just a few years ago. Public servants, as I said earlier, spent over a million hours in 2024-25 processing FOIs.

So why do we need to reform? What has changed? The FOI Act commenced in 1982, and the system is still stuck in the 1980s, long before the digital age, before the widespread use of email and many decades before smartphones and other modern technologies. At the time the FOI Act commenced, the number of electronic records created by government and the speed at which they are created was unimaginable. Also unimaginable in 1982 was the impact of the internet, which has made it possible for anyone anywhere in the world to generate large volumes of vague, anonymous, vexatious or frivolous requests without it costing them a dollar. As technology continues to develop, this will be a growing problem. When they are brought back, our FOI reforms will make the system more efficient and effective for the people who are genuinely seeking information. Our reforms will also protect the safety of public servants, save taxpayers' money on those requests that are frivolous and vexatious and ensure our FOI laws cannot be exploited by malicious actors.

I have seen plenty of evidence of the inappropriate threats that are made to public servants through the current ways that FOI is being used and utilised. It is unacceptable. The government does have a responsibility to act and ensure the safety of staff across the APS. This is not a joke. These are people who are having their home addresses identified, who are having widespread threats against their own individual safety and their families' safety because of the way the system is currently being worked and being abused, and the government needs to respond to that. As Minister for the Public Service, I say that this is a growing problem across the service, it should not be diminished and we should accept the responsibility that exists to make sure that the system in place serves the purpose it needs to serve in terms of freedom of information but also is not abused by those who have other intentions.

Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What a win for democracy, what a win for transparency but, more than that, what a win for the Australian people. The government is today admitting the bill they brought before the Senate was going to silence Australians. What an absolute disgrace. To everybody in the crossbench, to those of us on the non-government side of the chamber—the Liberal Party, the National Party, all of the crossbenchers. We worked together to ensure that the Australian people knew that—guess what—we would never allow the Albanese government to bring in a bill that was going to silence you and that was going to ensure that you did not have the basic democratic right that you deserve, and that is to access information held by the government. Colleagues, you do have to find it ironic, though, because, prior to May 2022, I do recall Mr Albanese, the now prime minister, saying that, when he was elected, this government would be the most transparent government that Australia had ever seen. And yet every single day in this parliament, whether it's this place or the other place, what we see is the erosion of democracy.

Forget transparency; they are closing the door every single chance that they can get. And then they have the audacity to bring in into the chamber—or attempt to bring into the chamber, because we were never going to allow it to get to debate—a bill that sounded so simple when Senator Gallagher described it. 'Oh, there's nothing to see here.' Well, guess what. That's not what the bill says.

The bill does almost the exact opposite of what Senator Gallagher just put on the table. This is a bill that was all about making it harder for the Australian people to access information. Yet, contrary to what the now Prime Minister said prior to the election, that his government would never be afraid of transparency, would never be afraid of actually being held responsible for their decisions—well, guess what Australia—they are not only closing the door on democracy and closing the door on transparency but, worse than that, they tried to close the door on the basic democratic right of any Australian to access information held by the government. That is an absolute disgrace.

Let's talk about freedom of information. What is it actually meant to do? It is there because in Australia we have a great system of government, a system of government that says government information belongs to the people. Why? Because we fundamentally believe in the principles of democracy. I hate to tell the Albanese government: if you believe in democracy, you actually believe that people have access to information; you don't shut the door on them. Let me tell you what this bill did. Under this bill, Labor were basically going to turn government information into a private asset that ministers were able to sit on. They were going to ensure that the public were going to actually have to pay for the right to access this information. They were actually going to have to ensure that they put in place every form of road block to you exercising your basic democratic right to ensure transparency of this government.

Do we think on this side of the chamber that the FOI system does need to be reformed? Yes, it clearly does need to be modernised. We all agree with that, and we have said we are more than happy to look at measures that will actually ensure that the public do get better access to information. The real problems are delays, backlogs and bad-faith behaviour and, yes, they are clogging the system. Yes, the system needs to be modernised. Yes, the system needs to ensure the public have a right to easily access information.

Let me be very clear here to the Australian people. The Liberal Party and the National Party will never ever support the Albanese Labor government seeking, by legislation, to entrench secrecy and price you out of being able to access information. We fundamentally believe FOI is a democratic right. You have the right to access government information. We will support modernisation of the system to make it easier, but the coalition will never support the Albanese government silencing Australians. (Time expired)

Fatima Payman (WA, Australia's Voice) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

What do we have here? We have the government coming into this place and discharging the same very bill that they claimed would make things easier, or, as we heard from Senator Gallagher 'nothing to see here, people'. Can I remind the chamber that this is the second bill the government has discharged of their own accord. After the misinformation and disinformation bill that failed miserably, this is the second bill now that they have come in here and have had to discharge because they have seen that the Senate is not willing to support them. I thank my colleagues in the Liberal Party, the Nationals, the Greens and the crossbench for coming together and saying, 'We will make sure we listen to the Australian public.' Journalists and whistleblowers have also raised concerns about this bill. It has been on the Notice Paper for a while and the government has refused to listen to the Australian public. We value democracy, we value transparency but while those opposite, the government, claim to have received a mandate from the Australian people to be more transparent, we are seeing the exact opposite. I am curious to understand how many hours of precious time did public servants spend on this bill, on having to curate it together? And it was all for nothing—all for the government to come, tail between its legs, and say, 'We're going to discharge it because there's no support.' Newsflash: if you rush something through, don't consult, don't talk to the Australian public—yes, we have to modernise it, but the way to modernise an FOI system isn't to charge the Australian public even more. They pay enough taxes already, but, clearly, the government doesn't see that.

You're so adamant on making it harder for people to gain access to information from your government. What do you have to hide? What was the whole point of establishing the National Anti-Corruption Commission, which, as a former Labor candidate, I campaigned heavily on? What's the whole point of claiming to be transparent, something that your own Labor members have been asking for, yet you come into this place and you say, 'No, we're just going to make it harder because of some frivolous and vexatious claims.' If you don't want to do your job properly, then just admit it, but we're not going to stop making sure we keep you accountable and making sure that transparency is paramount and that it's always prioritised in this place.

I also just want to give a shout-out to Rex Patrick, the transparency warrior, for walking the halls and making sure that this bill is taken off the Notice Paper. As we've seen, it's not fit for purpose. We are willing to come to the table and actually help with curating a proper bill that's fit for purpose, but, as it stands, nobody's backed it, and I'm glad that the government's finally realised that this bill that they'd introduced is a failure of a policy. It beggars belief. Is Minister Rowland fit for the cabinet? This is the second bill that has had to be discharged.

We get accused of being time-wasters here in the Senate—especially the cross bench when we're putting up OPDs or we're pushing for motions. I was hoping to have this debated next week and have the question put then. I'm glad that the government's finally realised no-one's going to support this shambolic bill. The Australian public deserve better. They deserve transparency. They deserve honesty. If the government's not going to do it, you've got the cross bench and the other parties here in the Senate fighting for the Australian people.

David Shoebridge (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Link to 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)

David Pocock (ACT, Independent) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the decision of the government to finally listen to the Senate, to listen to experts in our community and to, indeed, listen to the Australian people and dump this bill which would have significantly damaged our already broken FOI system. Listening to contributions, I think the tragedy of the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025 is that there is a recognition that the FOI system is out of date and that the act does need to be updated, but there has been nothing from the government to actually consult and to bring forward reforms that do that—that modernise it, that ensure that Australians get access to information held in their name in a more timely way and that we have a government whose default is openness not secrecy.

We hear a lot about the time it's taking and the cost it's taking to process FOIs. When you look at the statistics, it's not hard to see why that is happening. FOI requests granted have fallen from 59 per cent to just 25 per cent. That's a lot of time deciding which shouldn't be released. Refusals have nearly doubled, from 12 per cent to 23 per cent. Again, there's a lot of time in that. FOI review times have blown out from six months to 15½ months. I think most Australians would say that is totally unacceptable. This is an example of the Senate doing its job as a check on executive power, as a check on an executive which is seeking to protect itself, to reduce scrutiny and, as I've said a number of times, even go against the recommendations of the robodebt royal commission and to learn from that. This is an executive that is seeking to be able to operate in the dark. That is not aligned with Australian values and what the Australian public want and expect.

I would also, as Senator Shoebridge did, like to thank the Centre for Public Integrity for their leadership in this space, for the work they do and for their clarity of thought. They said that the proposed amendments represent 'an unprecedented and unjustified attack on the right of Australians to access government information'. I also join Senator Shoebridge in thanking the Human Rights Law Centre for their powerful advocacy in this space.

There are just far too many problems with this bill to go into, but I have been really concerned—again, as Senator Shoebridge pointed out—about the claims that there were foreign bots churning out FOI requests, which were proven through the inquiry process to be demonstrably untrue. There was simply no evidence that could be produced by the government or government departments that that is the case.

One of the other claims, which I agree is a big issue in service delivery for the government, was some of the threats, and we know that some examples given of threats in the FOI system actually did not relate to the FOI system. They were to do with Comcare. I have real concerns, again, about a government that is willing to actually use evidence over here to back up something that it is trying to do in this other space. That is a real concern when you look at the government's narrative on this bill.

We should be looking for ways to improve FOI. Firstly, we have to say that a default to openness rather than secrecy is how we reform FOI. The government would be saving public servants, who are doing incredibly valuable work, hundreds of thousands or potentially a million hours if there were a default to openness rather than this culture where, as I showed yesterday—and I won't use a prop again—we're just getting blacked-out pages from the government.

I think the second one is looking to technology solutions available through innovative Australian companies. We know that companies like Nuvento, right here in Canberra, are saying that they have secure offline systems that can rapidly transform FOI by actually finding the information and ensuring that it gets to the people who want that information sooner. It's curious that the government isn't looking at those solutions. You have to say, 'Well, people might actually get the information that they're after, and that doesn't suit the blacked-out pages and the secrecy we're seeing.' I welcome the Senate doing this, and I'd urge the government to engage. Let's do this properly. Let's, in this place, actually act on behalf of Australians.

Question agreed to.