5 June 2023
Mr Watson Norwood
By email: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xx
Dear Mr Norwood,
FOI request - Decision on access – FOI 23121
I refer to your request under the
Freedom of Information Act 1982 received on 6 May 2023.
I am authorised under section 23 of the FOI Act to make decisions under that Act.
Background
You request is as follows:
I am writing to make a request under the Freedom of Information Act for a complete copy of the
departments' Freedom of Information (FOI) logs for the period 2013-2023, including any
secondary departments controlled by the agency.
I request that this is provided as a document and not a simple redirect to the agency website as I
am of the view that your online disclosure logs do not actively reflect your FOI requests that you
have received in this period.
Decision
I have decided to release to you the disclosure log for eSafety, which you can find here:
Disclosure log | eSafety Commissioner. I have decided not to release this as a separate document
or to provide further records, for the reasons outlined below.
Material taken into account
I have taken the following material into account in making my decision on access:
• the scope of your request;
• the content of the documents in scope of your request;
• the relevant provisions of the FOI Act;
• advice from eSafety staff; and
• the guidelines issued by the Australian Information Commissioner under section
93A of the FOI Act (Guidelines).
Reasons for Decision
You have requested access to “a complete copy of the departments’ Freedom of
Information logs” for a 10 year period. eSafety does not have a record of FOI decisions for
this period that could be described a ‘log’ of those decisions, other than the disclosure log.
We have some records that serve as point in time snapshots of FOI matters on hand, but
these are not comprehensive lists of all maters dealt with, and have not been kept in a
consistent format, nor in a way that would allow them to be combined into a list of all FOI
matters without substantial work. The FOI Act does not require an agency to create
documents to respond to an FOI request.
You may be aware that agencies are required to report statistical information about their
work under the FOI Act to the Australian Information Commissioner. We would likely be
able to process a request for such statistics, which might give you some of the information
you were looking for when asking for our ‘FOI logs’.
If you have any questions regarding this decision, please contact me at xxx@xxxxxxx.xxx.xx.
A statement of your rights of review is attached.
Yours sincerely,
Morag Bond
Executive Manager, Legal, MarComms and Research
Attachments
1. Rights of Review
