Dear Department of Immigration and Border Protection,

I hereby request, under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth), a copy of the following document titled MIGRATION STREAM BY COUNTRY OF BIRTH available at:

http://www.immi.gov.au/living-in-austral...

for the settlement date [1][2] range 22 June 1993 to 03 April 2014. The document available at the above location is only for the date range:

1 October 2008 to 31 September 2013.

I specifically refer to Section 17 (1)(c)(i) of the Act (please see note 1 and 3 below) that says:

(c) the agency could produce a written document containing the information in discrete form by:

(i) the use of a computer or other equipment that is ordinarily available to the agency for retrieving or collating stored information

I also refer to part 8 of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) guidelines (please see note 2 below)

"8.110 Section 17 requires an agency to produce a written document if the applicant does not wish to be provided with a computer tape or disk. ..."

In addition, part 8.111 which sets out "As the definition of a document includes ‘any part of a document’, it is possible for an applicant to request information that is held in electronic form but stored in different formats or across databases. An agency should undertake reasonable efforts to arrange access to that information in one of the forms set out at s 20, or in a hard copy form (s 17).

Please send (post on this site) the reproduced document in both spreadsheet format (.xls format) and PDF format if this does not interfere with your work or become resource intensive, for the date range requested.[3][4]

Note that the The Right to Know email address is valid for the purposes of s.15(2)(c) of the FOI Act.

I also make an application that all costs for the processing of this request be waived on the grounds that the release of this information is in the public interest, as the information will allow public awareness in the available migration streams and their use.

Yours faithfully,

kushra navartne

[1] - including stateless persons.

[2] - Settlement Date is 'date of visa grant' for settlers who were in Australia when their visa was granted, and 'date of arrival in Australia' for settlers who were overseas when their visa was granted. I presume that both sets of data were used for producing the document MIGRATION STREAM BY COUNTRY OF BIRTH.

[3] - If convenience and efficiency allows you to export the data to the requested formats.

[4] - I refer to OAIC guidelines (note 2 below - use of pdf document) section -

8.108 The FOI Act gives a legally enforceable right of access to documents that already exist. An agency is not required to create a new document to satisfy an FOI request.[20]

However, it may sometimes be simple and more effective to create a new document, for example, where information can be easily compiled from a database to answer a specific request, rather than providing many separate documents with extensive deletions. In those
cases, the Information Commissioner encourages agencies to consult the applicant and determine if doing so will satisfy their request (see also paragraphs 8.110–8.113 .... ).

[20] - Davis and Attorney-General's Department [1986] AATA 554.

Note 1 - also referred to in Part 3 of the OAIC guidelines available at:

http://www.oaic.gov.au/freedom-of-inform...

Note 2- part 8 of the OAIC guidelines - I have used the pdf document available at:

http://www.oaic.gov.au/images/documents/...

the information is available on the OAIC website at the location below:

http://www.oaic.gov.au/freedom-of-inform...

However, it notes the particular section as "8.111 Section 17 requires an agency to produce a written document if the applicant does not wish to be provided with a computer tape or disk. ..."

AND

lists "8.112 As the definition of a document includes ‘any part of a document', it is possible for an applicant to request information that is held in electronic form but stored in different formats or across databases. An agency should undertake reasonable efforts to arrange access to that information in one of the forms set out at s 20, or in a hard copy form (s 17)."

There is clearly a mismatch between the particular sections of the pdf version and the website version. I have used the pdf document version throughout this request.

Note 3 - I have referred to the FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT 1982 document available at the location below for the purposes of this request:

http://www.austlii.edu.au/cgi-bin/downlo...