"Nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy? : a paper" (1991)

Dan Monceaux made this Freedom of Information request to Department of Defence

This request has been closed to new correspondence from the public body. Contact us if you think it ought be re-opened.

The request was successful.

Dan Monceaux
Sent

Dear Department of Defence FoI Officers,

I am writing to request a copy of a paper published by the Navy League of Australia in 1991 entitled "Nuclear-powered submarines for the Royal Australian Navy? : a paper" by John C Grover; A J Robertson.

Should the Department of Defence not be able to locate this paper within its own records, I note that a copy is held by the ANSTO library. Details here: http://ansto.worldcat.org/title/nuclear-...

I have also written an email to the Navy League of Australia requesting a copy for research purposes, but have not received a reply as yet.

I am making this request under the Freedom of Information Act 1982.

Yours faithfully,

Dan Monceaux

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Stinson, Theresa MRS, Department of Defence

1 Attachment

UNCLASSIFIED

Good afternoon Mr Monceaux,

Thank you for your email below. Your request is not considered to be a valid request under the FOI Act as you have sought access to publicly available information.

I would note that the Navy League of Australia is not a Defence Organisation. However, the report that you seek access to appears to have been published in the Navy News many years ago.

While not required, to assist I sought advice about whether Defence held a copy of the report, and am pleased to advise that a copy was located at the Defence Library and a copy is attached.

Please note that this report is not being released to you under the FOI Act, and there are no review rights available to you. nor should you take this as an indication that we will undertake searches for publicly available documents in the future.

Happy reading.

Kind regards

Theresa Stinson
Assistant Director - Case Management
Governance and Reform Division

Ph: (07) 3332 6359

Alternative email: [email address]

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Verity Pane left an annotation ()

The agency's claim "Your request is not considered to be a valid request under the FOI Act as you have sought access to publicly available information" is not a terribly well put one.

This generally only applies where:
* documents are available for access under the Archives Act 1983 (Cth);
* documents are open to public access subject to a fee or charge
* the documents are accessible via the library, historical and museum collections of the Australian War Memorial, National Library of Australia, National Museum of Australia, National Archives of Australia and the National Film and Sound Archive.

In practice, when an applicant applies for documents otherwise already available, agencies usually just point them to those documents administratively, without being overly bureaucratic about it. It's not uncommon that someone requests something under FOI that might have been requested previously, and publicly available in that agency's disclosure log, for example.

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