The Royal Commission into Robodebt recommended making cabinet documents easier to access under FOI laws, finding the current system thwarted investigations into the scheme.
The Prime Minister himself described Robodebt as a "gross betrayal and human tragedy", yet his government plans to make cabinet documents harder to access.
This is in direct defiance of the Robodebt Royal Commission's recommendation to make cabinet documents available for public scrutiny.
"If cabinet documents had been public, the unlawful and cruel Robodebt scheme could have been exposed and prevented. For that reason, the Robodebt Royal Commission recommended making cabinet documents available under FOI," said Bill Browne, Director of the Australia Institute's Democracy & Accountability Program.
"The Albanese government wants to make documents even harder to access, in defiance of the Royal Commission, increasing the risk the next Robodebt will happen in secret."
"The over-use of the cabinet document exemption and other problems with the FOI system are critical reasons why Robodebt was allowed to continue with impunity for so long," said Maria O'Sullivan, Associate Professor at Deakin Law School.
"The proposed changes to the FOI Act will actually expand the cabinet exemption even further."
The new research also reveals that it is government inefficiency, not the number of requests, behind the growing cost of the FOI system.
"Information is to democratic participation as water is to life. People often take water for granted, until it stops flowing," said Rex Patrick, founder of the Whistleblower Justice Fund.
Key findings
The Albanese Government is lagging on transparency:
- Fewer FOI decisions are being made than in earlier years: 21,000 last year down from 34,000 in 2017.
- Only 21% of 2023-24 FOI requests were granted in full compared to 81% in 2006-07 (the last year of the Howard government).
- In 2023-24 it took 51 hours, on average, to determine one FOI request, up from 13 hours in 2006-07.
- If the Albanese government achieved the Howard government's cost-per-FOI-request ratio, taxpayers would save $61 million per year.
The changes proposed in the Albanese government's Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025 would exacerbate these problems:
- The fee for access would raise less than $500,000, against a scheme that cost $86 million last year.
- The Robodebt Royal Commission recommended making cabinet documents subject to freedom of information requests.
- The government's changes would instead make it even harder to access cabinet-related documents.
- The power to refuse a request that would take more than 40 hours to process means the less efficient an agency is, the more it could keep secret.
"Last year, it took over 50 hours to decide a single FOI request, up from 13 hours in 2007," said Bill Browne.
"In other words, the Albanese government employs four public servants to do what only took one public servant under the Howard government. If the government is serious about improving productivity, it should start with how it runs the FOI system.
"The Albanese government wants to charge the public for FOI requests, but the fees for a whole year's worth of FOI requests wouldn't cover the FOI regulator's legal fees in a single court case. "In the last year of the Howard government, 27,500 FOI requests were granted in full - compared to just 4,500 granted in full last year."
