Editorial
A government of secrets

This is a government of secrets. It is worse even than Scott Morrison’s on the record of complying with Senate orders to produce documents. Worse even than a government run on Henry VIII clauses and hidden ministries. It meets this obligation for disclosure less than a third of the time.

In the year Anthony Albanese was made prime minister, the government rejected more freedom of information requests than it granted in full. This was the first time such a ratio had ever been recorded.

A decade ago, six in 10 applications saw documents released in their entirety. That number is now one in four. The average time it takes to appeal a decision has increased from six months to more than a year. The number of requests refused outright has doubled.

“The alarming deterioration in transparency is deeply troubling,” says Geoffrey Watson, whose Centre for Public Integrity compiled the figures. “With the Albanese government’s supermajority, the risk of entrenched secrecy becomes greater, undermining democratic accountability.”

In 2015, in opposition, Mark Dreyfus represented himself at the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, seeking to use the Freedom of Information Act to access the ministerial diary of then attorney-general George Brandis. He won.

Justice Jayne Jagot found that Brandis had “no practical reason” to refuse the request. She dismissed his claim that it would take 300 hours to redact the diary and call the people named in it. There was “a significant public interest in knowing the outline of daily activities of elected representatives”. At the time, Dreyfus said the tribunal ruled Brandis’s “secretive approach to my simple request was in breach of the FOI Act”.

Seven years later, Dreyfus appointed Jagot to the High Court. A year after that, he received the recommendations of the royal commission into robodebt. The commission recommended the repeal of section 34 of the Commonwealth FOI Act.

Not only did Dreyfus refuse to implement this recommendation, he pretended it wasn’t a recommendation at all. “The commissioner made a closing comment,” he said, “rather than a recommendation.”

The recommendation, speciously ignored, said the Commonwealth Cabinet Handbook “should be amended so that the description of a document as a Cabinet document is no longer itself justification for maintaining the confidentiality of the document”.

This decision is indicative of the government’s approach to transparency. It is a sibling of the appalling choice to allow the majority of anti-corruption hearings to be held in camera. It is a reminder that the principles of opposition are rarely the practices of government. Accountability is easier when it’s for someone else.

Cabinet confidentiality is the woolly blanket of government secrets. It hides the truth about the most important decisions being made. All governments do this. Tony Abbott starved the information commissioner until his office was little more than a fax machine. His successors went to extraordinary lengths to keep documents hidden.

Labor promised to be different and then they were worse. This is the truth of a politics built to hide truth.

This article was first published in the print edition of The Saturday Paper on July 26, 2025 as "Woolly blanket".

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