Politics
From opacity to darkness – the government’s planned FOI changes
Australia’s federal government is already overly secretive. Planned changes to FOI laws would make it even worse, to the detriment of citizens’ capacity to participate in democratic processes.
At position #11, and as one of the world’s “full democracies”, Australia ranks reasonably well on the Economist Intelligence Unit Democracy Index. In fact in 2024 we moved up 3 places.
The EIU assesses nations’ democratic strengths on five dimensions, and on four of these dimensions we are up with the top-ranking northern European democracies. But on one, “political participation”, our score is poor – poorer even than in some of the countries classified as “failed democracies”, such as the USA.
Political participation is about the ways people relate to their governments. Do they interact with their politicians, belong to political parties, make submissions to government inquiries, contribute to public debate through blogs and websites? Or is government comparatively closed, protected by walls of secrecy and an official attitude that information should be carefully guarded lest it fall into the hands of a troublesome public?
The Nordic countries’ high rankings on the EIU Index are no doubt influenced by their attitudes to information. In Norway the right to access documents held by public authorities is anchored in the country’s Constitution. In Finland official documents are public documents unless otherwise regulated.
In Australia, however, the default assumption is that official documents, particularly those relating to cabinet deliberations, are secret, unless the public can find a chink in the curtains of secrecy through FOI processes.
This attitude is captured in the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill, currently before Parliament, described in a press statement by Attorney General Rowland, headed in Orwellian style as Strengthening the Freedom of Information Framework. One of the government’s concerns is that attending to FOI requests is costly, which is why they want to impose a new fee structure, and ban anonymous requests. They are also worried about protecting cabinet confidentiality, without mentioning the fact that any document attached to a cabinet submission can be classified as “cabinet in confidence”.
The proposed changes have met with strong opposition, particularly from the Centre for Public Integrity, which for the last three months has been supported by evidence of the government’s retreat from transparency, and warnings about the way the bill would make it harder for citizens to engage with government. For example the rate of outright refusal of FOI requests has doubled in just two years, and the government has become more obstructive in dealing with Senate Production Orders.
The Centre’s statement on October 6, calling for withdrawal of the bill, is issued jointly with the Human Rights Law Centre, the Whistleblower Justice Fund, the Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom and the Grata Fund.
The politics of the bill are covered in a Saturday Paper article by Jason Koutsoukis: Inside Albanese’s FOI reforms: “He hates transparency”. Koutsoukis finds that the government’s reasons for tightening FOI access do not stand up to scrutiny.
Defenders of tightening FOI put up the argument that if ministers’ and public servants’ advice to government were not protected by secrecy, they would be less frank in their written advice. But this begs the fundamental question: why, apart from national security considerations, should that advice be secret? If the government goes against advice put up by public servants, who are accountable to Parliament and whose salaries and operating expenses are appropriated by Parliament, why should the public not know what the advice is, how it is based, and why cabinet has rejected it? We may even be more trusting of government if we knew more about their decision-making, and didn’t have to rely on conspiracy theories and other misinformation from social media and the tabloid press.
As for the excuses about the workload of dealing with FOI, there would be only a trickle of requests if the government hadn’t become so bloody secretive.
Independent MPs and Senators, and Greens Senators, are understandably opposed to the government’s amendments. One could surmise that the Coalition will also be opposed. Sussan Ley has strongly criticized the bill – but there is the possibility that the Albanese government, in contempt for the five million Australians who did not vote for the Labor-Coalition duopoly, will rush through Parliament one of its dirty “bipartisan” deals in favour of government secrecy.
There are many factional players in the Liberal Party, but what do they stand for?
There’s a lot of noise about factional conflicts in the Liberal Party, but none of it seems to have anything to do with developing a policy framework that would establish their political legitimacy.
In last weekend’s Saturday Paper are two well-researched articles on the Liberal Party, one by an experienced journalist, the other by an academic well-respected for her rigorous biographical work on Australian prime ministers and party leaders.
Jason Koutsoukis’ article Abbott “disappointed” by Andrew Hastie as right splinters is about how Hastie, partly through his own behaviour, seems to have become a lightning rod for all the factional conflicts in the party. The suspects are named – Sussan Ley, Jacinta Nampijinpa Price, Angus Taylor, Scott Morrison, Tony Abbott, and even Josh Frydenberg in the context of an imagined political comeback. But apart from one denial that Hastie is trying to emulate Trump, there is nothing about the political or policy beliefs of these factional warriors. All we learn is that some are “right”, some are “centre-right”, and some are “hard-right”, but these labels have as little to do with ideologies or policies as the name “Liberal” has to do with liberalism.
Chris Wallace’s article Happy birthday Liberal Party of Australia (it turned 81 last Monday) starts with a chronicle of the fates of Liberal Party prime ministers: ever since Menzies left office it’s been a sequence of stories with unhappy endings. She tries to learn about the policies of those who are jockeying for influence, but is unable to tell us much, apart from confirming that Ley is up against the forces of the Murdoch and Stokes media and the LNP in country Queensland, which has become the Coalition’s last stronghold.
She mentions Ley’s idea of targeting social security spending more tightly, a standard Liberal policy. But we already have tightly-targeted spending, and it is becoming harder to identify people’s means.
She also mentions Ted O’Brien’s repeated calls for lower taxes and lower government spending. That’s easy to state, but it’s simply a Reaganite slogan rather than a policy. Australia is already close to the lowest-taxed “developed” country, with unmet needs in health care, education, housing and infrastructure, that has been muddling along with a raft of privatized taxes and ill-considered privatizations. If O’Brien’s general statement is to have any policy flesh he needs to state where and how he will cut spending, and explain the reasoning that leads him to his proposals.
O’Brien’s statements on spending expose the problem for Ley and other so-called “moderates”. Ley, as opposition leader, criticizes the government for instances of neglect and underfunding of specific programs. That’s good work. But at the same time her treasury spokesperson keeps spouting out the established “small government” party line.
On a different tack Jill Sheppard of ANU in a Conversation piece – Competence and vision: how to be a successful opposition – addresses the Liberal Party’s troubles in terms of the need for an opposition to demonstrate administrative competence while conveying a sense of its party’s vision.
On administrative competence it doesn’t take much for an opposition to wreck its electoral chances: a 2016 post on the ABC Great election campaign stuff-ups and blunders throughout history describes some of these blunders, particularly the Coalition’s costing mistakes in the 1987 election campaign which immediately turned the polls, which had been favouring the Coalition, back towards the Hawke government. Sheppard gives Ley full marks for her calm and assertive administrative style.
He abolished the UAP
As for vision, it appears to Sheppard that Hastie, who has “no patience for deliberative policy development processes”, has been offering his own vision of a Liberal government, a vision that doesn’t seem to be a vote winner.
What this means is that voters have little idea about how their lives may change, or how the fortunes of the nation would change, if a Liberal Party were to form government – and that’s before considering the influence of the National Party. The Liberal Party can offer the excuse that its policies are being reviewed, but from the leaks all we’re learning is that faction players are vying for positions in the “shadow cabinet”, blaming one another for their election loss, without acknowledging their collective blame for going to an election without a coherent set of policy principles.
Wallace brings her understanding of political history to the conclusion of her article, in a suggestion that has echoes of Menzies’ actions 81 years ago:
Elections can’t be won without mainstream support in the populous south-east of Australia, however. To become competitive again it might take a contemporary new centre-right party that welcomes rather than grudgingly tolerates women, embraces science-based climate policies and has high integrity standards.
The young are revolting
Around the world young people, fed up with governments, are making sure that their anger is heard.
Gen Z – people aged 13 to 29 – are taking to the streets worldwide, and those who have a chance to vote are expressing their anger at the ballot box.
That’s the general message in two consecutive Saturday Extra segments, hosted by Geraldine Doogue.
The first is about unrest among young people in Indonesia, Kenya, Madagascar, Morocco, Nepal, Peru and the Philippines, who have taken to the streets to protest against the opulent and vulgar excesses of the elites, and to express their dissatisfaction with wealth inequality, corruption and unemployment. To quote Nuurrianti Jalli of Oklahoma State University who appears on the program:
What unites these protests is not a single ideology, but rather a shared sense of betrayal, a belief that those in power are enriching themselves while ordinary people struggle to make ends meet.
These feelings have been building up for many years. Social media has probably played a part in helping people to organize, and to adopt a modified Jolly Roger flag as a symbol, but the specific issues bringing people on to the streets, such as Indonesia’s politicians awarding themselves perks of office, are local.
The other segment is about Australia’s Gen Z. The session starts with a discussion of right-wing political “influencers”, suggesting that there are replicas of Charlie Kirk’s movement in Australia. But Kos Samaras disagrees, pointing out that Gen Z in Australia is “drastically shifting to the left”. He draws attention to polls among Gen Z showing that their support for the Coalition is in the “low teens” – in fact in single digits among women in large cities – while support for the Greens is about 45 percent. (This is consistent with recent Essential polling of the slightly older group – 18 to 34 – which shows support at 20 percent for the Coalition, 25 percent for the Greens, and 35 percent for Labor.)
For many reasons our Gen Z has not mobilized around a Charlie Kirk-type movement. While the issues around housing and intergenerational inequity are the same, our reactions are different. In comparison with the US and the UK we are more urbanized, the economic inequalities are less dire, and compulsory voting has probably played a part, says Samaras. In those other countries the young don’t bother to vote, but here they are forced to engage through the ballot box.
The session concludes with the observation that use of social media has reached a peak, and is now falling, particularly among younger people, who are turning to peer-to-peer communications – electronic versions of traditional social interaction modes. The research on social media, to which Samaras refers, is on Adam Tooze’s Substack post: Has most of the world passed peak social media?.
The implications for political parties are significant. For Labor it means they have to pay more attention to the Greens, who now constitute the “opposition” among young voters. It’s not clear that this has sunk into the minds of the party elders, who are trying to deal with the Coalition rather than the Greens in developing environmental legislation.
For the Coalition the implications are dire. If young people do become more conservative as they join the ranks of the middle class, they will probably turn to Labor as a safe conservative bet rather than to the Coalition, because the Coalition, in its recent manifestations, is displaying anything but conservatism.
My own back-of-the envelope calculation, based on 80 years of data, is that demography – the death of older people loyal to the Coalition – is costing it 0.5 percent support a year. That’s 1.5 percent per three-year election.