Dear FOI Department,

It has been noticed there are documents on your Freedom Of Information Disclosure Log where you have put the most redundant text next to FOI disclosures—the equivalent of “if you would like access to these documents, please email/contact us for access”.

Any person reviewing the information on that site would of course be after the documents. This lack of access displays complete disregard of the spirit of the FOI act section 11C and thus I request, under the Freedom of Information Act 1982, copies of the following documents:

All documents as is (that is, redacted or unredacted) from all previously made decisions on your department's FOI log that are currently not available for download direct from the website.

My preferred method of delivery for this information is for it to be placed on your department's Freedom of Information disclosure log web page as per part A) of 11C of the FOI Act. Should this request be successful you can put a simple list of the documents that were made available from the request, or whatever is most expedient, on the log.

I apologise for my pessimism, but past FOI experiences have led me to believe this request may elicit a response similar to “this request would divert too many resources of your department to complete”. Should you be thinking this, you have nobody to blame but yourselves—your department made this metaphorical bed.

Should you be seriously considering a practical refusal, my alternative request is for any documents that your department holds relating to the decision to include text on your freedom of information disclosure log similar to "contact us for access to this document".

In addition I request the total of the number of times any member of the public has asked for access to each non-website published successful documents on the FOI disclosure log other than the original successful applicant.

I do accept there is a very remote possibility there is a “Good Reason” for these not being available, and I hope these are contained within the documents provided as I cannot foresee any.

In the interests of expediency, I am willing to consider Administrative Access to said documents, should the document be provided within 30 days ( plus any public holidays in-between) of the sending of this email. After this time - the FOI Act applies as normal in all instances and any requests for extension will be denied without a supplied very good reason.

Regards,

Posty

Dear Sarah,

Firstly I'd like to thank you for supplying a version of the documents.

I finally got a chance to review them recently - i noticed you appeared to put all of them into two pdfs and sent them? this makes them practically really hard to read and have any context of which release is what as well as managing them. this is still overall a good outcome as now they are publicly available in SOME sense through righttoknow.org.au.

I'm still wondering if we can't make it a better outcome though.

In regards to 'being consistent' with other departments and compliance- it's actually the minority of federal government departments that are not making available documents for download from their disclosure log - I have outlined my results in an 'audit' of sorts here:

https://medium.com/@posty/federal-freedo...

More and more departments are moving to this model (some have done from day one) the dept of environment and energy have just started publishing theirs (not in above link).

I want to understand the barriers you're facing from putting them on the website - because if it is consistent as you say it is it would need to be the best way to do it when interpreting the FOI act ( RE interpretation - http://classic.austlii.edu.au/au/legis/c... ).

I do understand that you have a 'shared services' type environment with your IT needs and perhaps an internal helpdesk ticket can be lodged if you are unaware of the barriers.

It is exceedingly clear that it being on the website would be the best as this correspondence would need to have not ever taken place would it be so.

I'd like to prevent others or even myself from having to ask the same thing next year.

I'd like to know if there are any plans to join the rest of the departments in making them available for download, and if not - why not?

I'm happy for this to be answered administratively - take your time.

for helpful reference for other FOI deliveries - should you require to do this again for other purposes it would be easier to create a new folder in windows and then copy them all of the files to it, then create a zip.

I'm aware many government departments have access to 7-zip application that can split them to any differing size you wish:
https://www.linglom.com/it-support/how-t...

you can also upload documents (I'm told potentially up to 100mb) directly through right to know - for instance your two emails totalled about 30MB. you could have just upload directly to this website in one.

instructions here - apparently you just click the link at the bottom of this email:
https://www.righttoknow.org.au/help/offi...

Yours sincerely,

Posty