Mary-Anne Romano

Independent access to government held information is crucial for public interest journalism. Big data analysis and visualisation tools are powerful and have significantly enhanced journalism in the last decade. But these tools are still dependent on access to quality information. The long-held notion: poor information in – poor story out is still relevant. This is why well-functioning Freedom of Information (FOI)/Right to Information laws are crucial.

In 1990 there were 13 FOI laws globally (Banisar 2006), in 2023 that number is 135 and counting (GRIR 2023). The development has been phenomenal and expectations of extensive access to government held information is great. Unfortunately, many laws do not deliver what they promise. This hampers citizens’ participation in political processes and the ability of journalists to hold governments to account. Prominent examples of this are Australian FOI laws. This project aimed to find out why three Australian FOI regimes display such poor functionality in practice.

In 2022 Australia’s first FOI laws turned 40. This paper reports on a study comparing the implementation of FOI laws in the Australian states Victoria, South Australia and Western Australia. The research team gained unprecedented access to FOI officers, government agency executives and government ministers by partnering with the Information Commissioners in the three jurisdictions. The project was funded by the Australian Research Council.

The study tested the hypothesis that the culture of implementing FOI sat at the core of the functionality problem, rather than the design of the laws. The research questions were addressed by a mix of online surveys, followed up by focus groups and individual interviews. The sample of government agencies (95 in total across the three states with 254 interviews conducted) was large enough to be able to generalise the findings across the entire public service sectors in each jurisdiction.

Accountability theory was the conceptual base for the project and was used to interrogate and analyse the findings (Przeworski et al 1999, Olsen 2017). This framework is closely connected to holding societal powers to account, making this paper highly relevant to the conference topics of democracy and media, information and communication based on the keywords for the two topics.

The principal findings of the project was the pivotal importance of the executive level in government agencies for building and maintaining an information access culture that prioritises information access facilitation, rather than information access gate keeping. A second crucial finding was the close to complete disinterest in access to information issues among government ministers in all three jurisdictions. Third, the state of record keeping and management was vital to the practical functionality of access to information systems. The project contributes new knowledge for future national and international comparative studies of the functionality of access to information systems.