Freedom of Information NSW

Matthew Moore at the Sydney Morning Herald has been blogging for some time now about the problems facing journalists and the public in Freedom of Information applications to the NSW State Government.

On 4 May 2008 Moore wrote:

"So how come the review is five years late? The Attorney-General's spokesman said the blame lay with the Attorney-General's Department, headed by one of the state's most experienced public servants, Laurie Glanfield. "The delay arose because the Attorney-General's Department has used the opportunity to propose several reforms of the act," the spokesman said.


If it takes more than five years for the Attorney-General's Department to propose "several reforms" to the tribunal act, what hope is there that the Ombudsman's review of the FoI Act will ever be implemented? Remember, it took the Premier's Department and the Ombudsman's office nine years to rewrite interpretation guidelines for the FoI Act.


The one certainty about the NSW act's reform is that it won't happen in a hurry."


More than a year later on 23 July 2009 Moore wrote an article in the Sydney Morning Herald. He noted that:

"BARELY a month after introducing progressive freedom of information laws, the Premier has downgraded their importance by handing responsibility for their implementation to the Attorney-General.


His move ends two decades in which the premier has had responsibility for freedom of information, and runs counter to moves in Canberra to take responsibility for FOI laws away from attorneys-general and move them closer to the heads of government to increase their status and reduce the role of lawyers in interpreting them."

As Peter Timmins has so rightly characterised the matter: NSW Takes A Backwards Step.

Why be bothered about FOI, the current NSW Attorney General Mr John Hatzistergos and his Director General Mr Laurie Glanfield? In the current state of affairs the public is offered "freedom from information" -- it is not free to apply, and when the Government deems it so we are not allowed to know. Timmins has remarked:

"... the Attorney General has been involved in other instances of ordinary performance in this respect. Take the case of the long lost statutory review of privacy legislation, invisible publicly for years until the NSWLRC referred to it in August last year. Then in January this year the mysterious case of the statutory review of the NSW Administrative Decisions Act, with nothing surfacing publicly for years after it should have been tabled in Parliament. Even when eventually published, locating the reports and government responses is tough going (good luck, even with this link after hard digging) and submissions received as part of the reviews are never published.Then there was the tabling in Parliament by the Attorney General of the Privacy NSW Annual Report last year, about six months after it was completed, and a few days before the end of the next reporting year.The Attorney General was also one of the many NSW ministers who didn't publish media releases on the web until the Premier insisted upon it last year. He doesn't speak publicly often: one of the two speeches now posted on his website outlines his vigorous opposition to a charter of rights for Australia.All pretty good background for the minister responsible for the making of a regulation concerning the planned publication scheme for government agencies, required by the new act."

Timmins notes above in passing about "digging" through Lawlink the website sponsored by Mr Glanfield's Department. Lawlink has to be rated as one of the worst websites operated by a state government department. Its search facility malfunctions and supplies erroneous and misleading "search results". It is badly laid out on various pages so that one has to unnecessarily scroll down long lists of "agencies" to locate whatever agency you are seeking. The website seems to be structured in various pages so as to cause maximum user-frustration in searching for information.

Lawlink is the same website that hosts the site of the Office of the Protective Commissioner (OPC) (one half of the new outfit the NSW Trustee and Guardian). What an atrocious mess awaits the clients of the former Public Trustee NSW once their website vanishes and is amalgamated into the defective Lawlink set-up under the OPC's software. Yes it will save an estimated $10 million that would have been needed had the OPC's primitive system been integrated into that of the Public Trustee.

Of course as Public Trustee clients slowly find out that it has been taken-over by OPC, watch the revocation of Wills and Powers of Attorney sky-rocket. Why will they gradually find out? It is understood on the grapevine and among people who are not part of his department that Mr Glanfield did not want Public Trustee clients to be informed while the legislation was before Parliament lest there be any dissent.

However all will be well because of the new 13 Super-Departments created as a desperate diversionary measure to deflect the public from screaming about lousy service and incompetence. Ah yes, now we come to the much touted "efficiencies" of the Attorney General's Department. We are told that it is efficient. We are told that it is a leader among its interstate counterparts.

We are offered by the Minister and Director General the current faddish jargon about delivering "value" and "better service". No longer are these agencies "business centres". Now they are centres of excellence delivering service to the public. About the only people who "may" believe those words are the bureaucrats who foist these words on over-worked and under-resourced employees and on the public. Well the public have not opened a novel called "Gullible's Travels"!

So in a bureaucratic culture where clients of a small government agency engaged in fiduciary activities were kept in the dark, one should not be surprised then that FOI is a misnomer for in practical terms it really looks like FFI (Freedom From Information).