Thank you for your help. Marginal LNP MPs are more likely to see a Federal Integrity Commission the PEOPLE'S WAY if electoral polls start to go down. So SUPPORT is very much needed!

"The liberties of a people never were, nor ever will be, secure, when the transactions of their rulers may be concealed from them." ~ Patrick Henry

This week SA Senator Rex Patrick raised the issue of Freedom Of Information and how it is no longer OUR Freedom - or even HIS as an elected REPRESENTATIVE of 'we the PEOPLE'!

FOI failure: The tricks government uses to keep Australians in the dark (thenewdaily.com.au)

Up until 1982 we had had secretive Government. Our Government wasn't obliged to enable us to know HOW they made a decision on a matter - or why..

in 1982 under the Fraser Government the Freedom of Information Act was passed - where members of the public, journalists and non-Government Elected members and Senators could write and access submissions and information.  

There was a time limit set on how long this was supposed to take and reasons for disallowing information could be challenged.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_of_Information_Act_1982

This had BIPARTISAN support - because ALL our Politicians back then saw transparency in Government as being important!

However, the PROCESS has always been slow and  cumbersome and some Departments of Government are much less transparent than others.

However in the past few years things have become SO bad with ANY excuse for secrecy being used to black out lines and lines of text on a document that no one can make any sense of it - that the Senate in October 2019 held a Press Freedom Inquiry where a whole group of media organisations banded together to appear at the inquiry demanding that changes be made to FOI legislation

Press Freedom Inquiry: Australia’s right to know is under threat (news.com.au)

In January 2019 The Guardian did a month-long investigation into the operation of freedom of information (FOI) laws and identified

"systemic problems causing vast volumes of government information to be kept secret"

The Guardian found: (full article attached to this post)

*FOI refusals are at their highest level since records began in 2010-11, spiking recently due to the secrecy of the Northern Australian Infrastructure Facility (Naif), the agency that gave conditional approval to lend Adani $1bn in taxpayers’ money. Naif rejected 99.4% of the FOI requests it received.

*More than 2,000 FOI requests have taken three months longer than the statutory time frame to finalise, rendering the documents all but irrelevant by the time they are released, if they are released at all.

*FOI teams have shrunk in at least 20 government departments or agencies. Meanwhile, the federal government is increasingly refusing to process FOI requests because they are too onerous. The government’s use of “practical refusal” grounds to block FOI requests has skyrocketed to record highs, increasing by 163% last financial year alone

.*The regulator, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, has been chronically understaffed, despite an expanding remit and a 72% increase in the number of complaints received about FOI. The OAIC was gutted under the Abbott government, leaving it with two-thirds of the 100 staff minimum needed to do its job.

Academics, authors and not-for-profits are being denied the most benign of documents.

Journalist and author William Summers has been battling to obtain a copy of Parliament House lunch menus for two months without success because the Department of Parliamentary Services is not beholden to FOI laws.

Lockout campaigner and academic Tony Brown was wrongly blocked from receiving a hotelier’s submission to a recent inquiry into Newcastle’s lockout laws because the NSW Department of Industry indicated it had promised the publican it would remain secret, in a submission seen by Guardian Australia.

In the past year, heavy redactions have prevented the public knowing whether Australians are fighting as mercenaries in the bitter conflict in Yemen"

The full article gives stats and times.

So it means that if you DON'T WANT to be TRANSPARENT with journalists and the public - you deliberately cut staff so they can't DO THEIR JOB

As anyone who has waited on a Centrelink phone line for hours can attest to!

Senator Patrick this week has said he has been waiting for 2 YEARS to access some documents

So it appears this is just ANOTHER way Australians are being denied transparency and accountability by our ELECTED Government!