Labor’s lies about robodebt are at the heart of its assault on FOI

Labour’s Freedom of Information (FOI) invoice is accompanied by an extraordinary, Trumpian lie about Robodebt.

On Wednesday, Chief Public Prosecutor Michelle Rowland presented the reason for a key change that would significantly change the exemption of the cabinet certificate in our existing FOI laws: it was based on what we learned from the Robodebt anger of change.

And really Robodebt Royal Commission Although there are other documents in the cabinet process but do not meet the “dominant purpose” test, it aims to exempt the cabinet certificate in the current FOI laws, which are exempted from the “dominant purpose” of the cabinet assessment.

Royal commissioner Catherine Holmes said that cabinet documents are available through FOI, that the deception in the heart of Robodebt – a illegal plan, and that its authors would be discovered much earlier than the beginning. “This raises the question of whether the protection of the cabinet documents as a class should be maintained from the description or whether there is a certain public benefit in maintaining their privacy.”

Holmes, FOI law Remove and proposed:

Commonwealth Cabinet Handbook must be replaced in a way that is no longer a justification to maintain the privacy of a document as a cabinet certificate. The change should be explained that confidentiality is reasonable reasonable for a defined public interest on a part of the cabinet documents or cabinet documents.

So, does Rowland and the government apply Holmes’ advice? When you listen to Rowland on Wednesday, you would think so. “Something I will say” He told ABC““ As we have learned through Robodebt, another example of lack of transparency that cost people’s lives within the previous government, we only do this to label something ‘cabinet safe’ and plan to conceal it in this law. “

Of course, you know where this is going: Rowland is doing the opposite of what Holmes suggests.
Instead of reclaiming cabinet exemption, dramatic expanding This returned to the place where John Faulkner of Labour was in 2009 before reducing the exemption that everything that was indefinitely attached to the cabinet process was exempt. . Public integrity center This is “classic Yes minister Movement ”. Young generations may call it something else: open gas lighting.

Hearing that Rowland calls those who died as a result of Robodebt makes the lie particularly dirty and aggressive, as if a kind of recognition of this invoice. This is an absolute shame.

It’s not the only lie hanging around the package. As Anton Nilsson said yesterday, Rowland created a positive Trumpian fiction that “open sea actors” used FOI to obtain information, but could not produce any evidence to support the claim, and that the government could offer an example of an agency containing the internet censorship e-entry commission. It is the latest example of national security used as a fig leaf for government confidentiality and avoidance of accountability.

This is not just a bad bill, but also a bad invoice supported by nonsense from a government that makes the big election win on the head. Australia’s major media companies, ABC and SBS had come together before. The right to know the Australian campaign To oppose the government’s attacks against media freedom and lack of transparency. Such a campaign is necessary again to combat a very retrograde invoice that would be the biggest attack on transparency in a generation, but even in a short time since the last campaign, the media’s resources have shrunk for such a campaign.

Freedom of knowledge is not only for media or activists. For customers who are followed by governments by lawyers, citizens and non -governmental deputies caught in anger such as Robodebt are used as a way to cut the spin that ministers deployed to avoid examination. It is for everyone to use – and as insightful, politically busy people, Crirase Readers are excellent citizens who use FOI laws to take a look at the government’s operations before being neutered by the labor force. In a new campaign that started on Monday, we will have more to say about it.