A PARLIAMENTARY committee that includes Member for Mildura Jade Benham has released a report reviewing Victoria’s freedom of information, or FOI, laws.
The report, which made 101 recommendations, took into account 69 submissions and expert advice delivered during six days of public hearings this year.
In the committee’s view is that Victoria’s current FOI laws should be replaced with a Right to Information Act, as freedom of information laws were “struggling to meet the needs of modern democracy” and the system had a “reputation for being impenetrable”.
The committee recommended the laws be overhauled to promote the proactive release of information and maximum disclosure, with formal requests for information being the last resort.
Committee chair Greens MP Dr Tim Read said the current process of attempting to pull information out of agencies through formal requests was “not well adapted to the functioning of modern government in the digital age”.
“It cannot be fixed through piecemeal reform,” he said.
“Delays, high fees, and in some agencies, a defensive culture of refusing to release information wherever possible, have all given the current system a reputation for being impenetrable.”
Victoria had more FOI requests per annum than any other state or territory, with in excess of 48,000 FOI requests made in the 2022/23 reporting period.
The committee heard numerous testimonials that Victoria’s public sector needed a new culture of transparency, built around the pro-active release of information.
It recommended information should be pushed out by four release mechanisms: mandatorily, pro-actively, informally and formally.
Ms Benham said the committee had also suggested the State Government abolish application fees, limit access charges, and make it free for the Victorians to access their personal and health information.
“You can get into the thousands of dollars in application fees, because FOI can be expensive depending on what you need,” she said.
“The waiving of application fees for everybody was certainly very, very important for a lot of people.
“In the original Act it doesn’t have any provision for digital documents and digital storages.
“Reform is obviously needed and the (information) push model that we’ve seen in New South Wales, in Queensland and New Zealand and other jurisdictions around the world actually works far more efficiently.
“You end up removing a lot of that cultural problem that we’ve heard a lot about and it’s just a far more efficient way to manage information that people have a right to access.”
Head of Journalism at Monash University, Associate Professor Johan Lidberg, said the recommendation to change the terminology from freedom of information to right to information was symbolically important.
“This could be a win-win for both FOI/RTI users and the overburdened and underfunded FOI/RTI officers in government agencies,” he said.
“Introducing harm and public interest tests for assessing why information should not be released is another crucial recommendation.
“However, the proof is in the pudding. It now remains to be seen if the current and future Victorian governments will respond in a meaningful way to these powerful recommendations.”
The Victorian Government has six months to respond to the committee’s recommendations.
