Dear Department of Human Services,

If possible, please treat this as an informal or administrative request. Otherwise, please treat this as a formal request for documents under the Freedom of Information Act 1982.

I request the following information from the department:

- Meeting agendas, minutes, and other notes for any and all meetings held with the Minister for Human Services between 1 Jan 2016 and 31 Dec 2016, inclusive.
- Meeting agendas, minutes, and other notes for any and all meetings held with the Minister for Social Services between 1 Jan 2016 and 31 Dec 2016, inclusive.

Yours faithfully,

Justin Warren

Dear FOI.LEGAL.TEAM,

To clarify, when I refer to "The Minister" I mean both the Minister as a person and their office, as the Office of the Minister acts on the Minister's behalf.

I look forward to receiving the information I have requested.

Yours sincerely,

Justin Warren

Dear FOI.LEGAL.TEAM,

I am happy to narrow the scope of the documents that I seek to those that relate to either of:

- the Better Management of the Social Welfare System initiative, or
- Taskforce Integrity.

Yours sincerely,

Justin Warren

Dear Department of Human Services,

Please pass this on to the person who conducts Freedom of Information reviews.

I am writing to request an internal review of Department of Human Services's handling of my FOI request 'Meetings with Ministers'.

Section 24AB of the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (the FOI Act), requires the Department to provide a reasonable opportunity to consult with the contact person. I contend that a single emailed reply citing a practical refusal reason is not consultation.

"Assistance to revise request

(3) If the applicant contacts the contact person during the consultation period in accordance with the notice, the agency or Minister must take reasonable steps to assist the applicant to revise the request so that the practical refusal reason no longer exists.

(4) For the purposes of subsection (3), reasonable steps includes the following:

(a) giving the applicant a reasonable opportunity to consult with the contact person;

(b) providing the applicant with any information that would assist the applicant to revise the request.
"

The Department's FOI team is not contactable by phone. The Department's switchboard has no contact number for them, and will not transfer calls to the FOI department. When invited on other occasions to contact me by phone to consult, the FOI team has not done so. The only way to contact the FOI team is by email, and responses take days or weeks, and do not volunteer any information that can be used to narrow the scope of requests.

I contend that this is not "a reasonable opportunity to consult with the contact person".

Other government agencies' FOI departments are contactable by phone, and are responsive to email discussions. They have been quite helpful in assisting to narrow the scope of FOI requests so that they are tractable while still being informative. DHS has been evasive and secretive.

I contend that the Department did not provide a reasonable opportunity to consult, and that the Department did not provide "any information that would assist the applicant to revise the request" in order to "to assist the applicant to revise the request so that the practical refusal reason no longer exists." Evidence to support this contention exists in that the practical refusal reason was given a second time despite my good faith efforts to reduce the scope such that a practical refusal was no longer required.

A full history of my FOI request and all correspondence is available on the Internet at this address: https://www.righttoknow.org.au/request/m...

Yours faithfully,

Justin Warren