Wednesday, 16 October 2024

Integrity and Oversight Committee

Inquiry into the Operation of the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Vic)

Jade BENHAM (Mildura) (10:29): My report today is the Integrity and Oversight Committee’s report on the operation of the Freedom of Information Act 1982. This was tabled out of session in September. It was a pleasure to work on this, along with the other members of the Integrity and Oversight Committee. I am more than happy to speak to it today. I am sure many members in this place have had dealings with the freedom-of-information process in this state, and if you have, you will understand that it is essentially broken. Among the 100 recommendations that were made in the report, the biggest thing to come out is that it needs a complete overhaul given that the act is 40 years old and has not had significant reform since then. A new-generation Freedom of Information Act is well and truly needed given that in 1984 you were probably using a Commodore 64 computer, if you were lucky to be able to access one, or an Apple IIe. There is no real provision in the act – there is a lot of terminology, such as ‘documents’, but we know now that if you are trying to FOI certain things, it may not be documents, it may be all sorts of things that have evolved over the last 40 years.

It was very interesting. We heard also about the culture of FOI in this state. Victoria has more freedom-of-information requests than any other state in this country, and that is largely because of the age of this act. Queensland and New South Wales – we heard from a lot of other jurisdictions during the process – are up to their third-generation push model of information. So that was, again, the number one recommendation – that it needs a complete overhaul. It needs complete reform, moving to that third-generation push model and a right-of-information act.

But we did receive 69 submissions. We held six days of hearings, and there were a total of 101 ‍recommendations to improve and modernise Victoria’s FOI system and fix that culture issue that we kept hearing about over and over again. Again, if you have had any dealings with the FOI system, whether it has been through trying to obtain medical documents, which is a lot of what we heard – a lot of these FOI requests could be negated if it was a push model, because the bulk of those requests are for information about the self with regard to medical records et cetera. It is people looking for information on themselves.

It was interesting to note, though, that we heard from many, many agencies and also local governments. It was a surprise to me, given my background in local government, that some did not quite get why there would be FOI requests made to local government. I can tell you – and there has been a lot of chat about local governments and councils already this morning – in my time in council there were requests for information that could not be released, or if it was, it was incredibly redacted. But people will spend time and money – because there are application fees associated with FOI requests – requesting all sorts of things. So there are recommendations around that.

Another recommendation was the removal of application fees when seeking information about oneself. However, changing to a third-generation push model and pushing out all of the information that is largely requested anyway will then reduce the volume of FOI requests made each and every year. That has got to be a good thing, and hopefully that will help negate those extraordinarily long delays and the high fees. Public records too – some of them are not in a great state, and as we digitise hopefully that will get better. But again, it is vital that this sort of act – freedom of information – is modernised given that it is 40 years old.

There were a few other key recommendations that I did want to talk about, but given I have got 12 ‍seconds I will just brush over recommendation 11, which is the limited internal information exception – and that is the Freedom of Information Act.