Department permanently on defence (Aus)
Department permanently on defence
You don't often hear freedom-of-information staff telling what really goes on inside government, so it was refreshing to get a letter from Stephen Brown, who for 15 years was head of the legal services branch of the Defence Department.
Brown has long since retired from his stint as the man nominally responsible for deciding what the public could know about one of Canberra's more secretive departments.
He says he and his staff were committed to the ideals of freedom of information but were continually frustrated by their lack of authority to make binding decisions.
"The problem, of course, was that under the department's FoI arrangements, the decision-making authority about release rested with the functional area connected with the documents sought," he writes.
"Managers in those areas had a very strong tendency to put up the shutters, using such obvious techniques as delaying decisions, overstating the time involved in locating documents and deciding upon them and failing to consult applicants in order to refine requests."
When Brown got a request for information about a capital procurement program, it was passed on to that section, which then sought its own legal advice to block release.
Brown says ministers and their staff were always an obstacle, despite ministers' claims that FoI decisions refusing access to material were made at arm's length.
"It was always disappointing that there was not stronger commitment to the principles of FoI from the political level and from higher levels of management," he writes. "Political staffers, in particular, were the most hostile to the release of documents.
"It was our practice to keep higher management and the minister's officers informed of potentially sensitive FoI applications, but this could lead to 'requests' and 'suggestions' about processing which technically were not part of the system but in practice could influence the outcome."
Brown says the first years of the Howard government and his last years in the job were as bad as any.
"The Howard government was made up of control freaks," he writes. "If a document was going to distort or betray a message it would not be disclosed."
It is difficult to see what has changed since the arrival of Kevin Rudd, especially in the Defence Department.
Take this week. When Australian troops marked the start of their withdrawal from Iraq with a ceremony, there were no Australian journalists present. The Defence Minister, Joel Fitzgibbon, and his spin doctors refused to provide advance notice.
Instead, Defence's media department distributed its own images and audio to the media, ensuring its version of events would be the only one available. Security was given as the reason only defence public relations staff could attend.
It was hard to use the same excuse when Defence began digging up the remains of Australian soldiers killed at Fromelles in World War I.
Journalists were corralled behind crime scene tape, and when bodies were found the discovery was denied until the minister could make the announcement.
Matthew Moore is the Herald's Freedom of Information editor. Tell him your successes
and failures at foi@smh.com.au.
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