PM Albanese’s culture of secrecy, in three charts

As Leader of the Opposition, Anthony Albanese spoke in no uncertain terms about the shortcomings of then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison when it came to transparency. Mr Morrison, Mr Albanese said, led a “shadow government that preferred to operate in darkness” with a motto of “nothing to see here”.

When it comes to Freedom of Information, Mr Albanese risks replicating what he once criticised. The share of FOI requests granted in full has almost halved since he took office, and sits at just a quarter of what it did in 2006-07 – the last year of the Howard Government.

The effect is that whereas in 2006-07, there were 27,500 FOI requests granted in full, just 4,500 were granted in full in 2023-24.

The current Labor Government claims that they’re living up to the transparency they promised when they took office. But their proposed Freedom of Information Amendment Bill would make it harder and more expensive for Australians to get information from the Government.

Labor senators attempted to defend the Government’s record on FOIs in a few ways during hearings into the proposed bill:

• saying that reforms to the FOI system since 2007 make them “apples and oranges”, and therefore comparison is disingenuous,
• claiming that clarifications to the OAIC’s classification guidance in 2022 are what really explain the drop in FOIs granted in full,
• pointing to a “record number” of FOI requests last year as evidence of the “impact of AI”.

First, while there have been significant reforms to FOI legislation in the past two decades, they are not so transformative that the system is now a wholly different beast. The most significant reforms since 2007 were made by Special Minister of State John Faulkner in 2010. They put a new presumption of openness and maximum disclosure in place, made it easier for members of the public to make FOIs, and established the independent Australian Information Commissioner to oversee the system. The Faulkner reforms made the system more open and transparent, so if they hamper comparison it should be because the system is now much better at publicising information, not worse as the Albanese Government claims.

And while it is true that the OAIC issued a clarification to departments on what counts as fulfilling an FOI request “in full” rather than “in part”, the drop predates that guidance.

Outright refusals of requests have also grown dramatically, having quadrupled over the past two decades. In 2021-22, the last year of the Morrison Government, 19% of requests were refused. That’s grown by a quarter to 25% last financial year.

Another statistic used by the Albanese Government to justify its reforms is the record 43,456 FOI requests received last year, which the system is supposedly struggling to cope with. This may sound high, and it does represent a significant rise from the 34,706 requests in 2023-24, but it is far from unprecedented.

There were just 2% more requests received in 2024-25 than the previous record year, 2003-04, when the government received 42,627 requests. Is the Albanese Government really incapable of handling a task 2% larger than that faced by the Howard Government over two decades ago?

The APS has grown significantly since the Howard Government – there are now over 25,000 more public servants than there were in 2007 – so a just 800 additional FOIs should not be a uniquely difficult challenge.

Last year’s request numbers were also only slightly higher than the 41,333 in 2019-20, when the Morrison Government that Mr Albanese labelled a “cult of secrecy” held office. The high number of requests was not a cause for alarm then, nor is it now.

Earlier this month, The Saturday Paper reported that Mr Albanese “hates transparency”. True or not, the FOI system’s slide towards greater secrecy shows that such an attitude permeates his government. If he doesn’t change course, Mr Albanese may end up leading exactly the kind of “shadow government” that he derided his predecessor for.