OFFICIAL
18 December 2024
FOI ref: 3812
Francis Markham
Right to Know
By email
: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xx
Dear Mr Markham
FREEDOM OF INFORMATION REQUEST – CONSULTATION
I refer to your request to the Treasury dated 5 December 2024 for access under the
Freedom
of Information Act 1982 (
FOI Act) to the following documents:
A copy of any evaluations, reviews or assessments of the impact of tobacco excise on
smoking behaviour (e.g. consumption, prevalence, product switching to e-cigarettes,
product switching to the black market, etc.). Please include any that have been
undertaken, commissioned or received by Treasury since 2018.
I am an authorised decision maker under section 23 of the FOI Act.
I am writing to tell you that I believe that the work involved in processing your request in its
current form would substantially and unreasonably divert the resources of this agency from its
other operations due to the broad scope of your request. This is called a ‘practical refusal
reason’ under section 24AA of the FOI Act.
On this basis, I intend to refuse access to the documents you have requested. However, you
have an opportunity to revise your request before I make a final decision. This is called a
‘request consultation process’ in section 24AB of the FOI Act.
Ordinarily, you have 14 days to respond to this notice in one of the ways set out below.
However, as the Treasury is closed from 24 December 2024 to 1 January 2025, we are happy to
extend the request consultation period to
Friday 10 January 2025.
Why I intend to refuse your request
Keyword searches undertaken by just one Treasury staff member resulted in over 450 emails
(excluding attachments) and over 90 documents which would need to be individually reviewed
to determine whether or not they meet the terms of your request.
Extrapolating these figures to a conservative average of 3 pages per email chain or document,
we estimate there is at least 1,500 pages of material that would need to be retrieved and
reviewed to find documents relevant to your request. Given your request covers a seven year
date range, this includes searching the email mailboxes of former as well as current employees
Langton Crescent
Parkes ACT 2600
Australia
P: +61 2 6263 2800
OFFICIAL
OFFICIAL
of the Treasury. Time take for a document review takes no account of any third party
consultations that would need to be undertaken in relation to your request, nor time to
prepare the documents for release and draft a statement of reasons.
Accordingly, I am satisfied that this would place a significant burden on a limited number of
Treasury staff and would substantially and unreasonably divert the resources of the Treasury
from its other operations.
Request consultation process
You have an opportunity to revise your request. This might mean narrowing the scope of the
request to make it more manageable or explaining in more detail the documents you wish to
access. This will assist the Treasury to focus on the documents that you are most interested in,
saving time and resources.
Examples of possible revisions include:
•
Substantially reducing the date range for your request.
•
Confine the request to a particular document type (e.g. Ministerial submissions, reports.)
•
Excluding emails from the scope of your request.
If you revise your request in a way that adequately addresses the practical refusal grounds
outlined above, we will recommence processing it. Please note that the time taken to consult
you regarding the scope of your request is not taken into account for the purposes of the
30 day time limit for processing your request.
What you need to do
You must contact us by cob Friday 10 January 2025 to:
• withdraw your request
• make a revised request
• tell us that you do not wish to revise your request.
You can contact us at by phone on (02) 6263 2800 or by email a
t xxx@xxxxxxxx.xxx.xx.
If we do not hear from you by that date, your request will be taken to be withdrawn.
Questions?
The Treasury FOI team is available to help you during the consultation period by phone on
(02) 6263 2800 or by email to
xxx@xxxxxxxx.xxx.xx.
Yours sincerely
Emma Baudinette
Assistant Secretary
Personal And Indirect Tax And Charities Division
2
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