30 March 2012

Intriguing FOI releases

| johnboy
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So what do we have here? A Friday afternoon FOI dump.

    I’ll be having a leaf through them, but if you find something interesting sing out in the comments.

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Heaps of documents are exempted, and when they are released on a Friday afternoon to miss the weekend papers, you know something’s up.

A few things jump out at me.

Firstly with regard to the FOI request for documents relating to interest declarations, I find it fascinating that the only document to pass through the chief ministers office on the subject was an internal email chain in regards to a submission to a book of poetry partly funded by The Territory. It mirrors a situation from my home shire\LGA where the only declaration of interest for the entire year was by a greens aligned councillor who declared an interest in a book of poetry that had received some local government support. Freaky. Anyway, I would’ve thought that the chief minister’s office would be privy to a fair bit of correspondence on such matters, potentially even some with actual fiscal and political implications, but apparently not.

Secondly, I refer to the letter of response to the request regarding inappropriate and/or queried expense claims. Apparently if the officer doing the search finds no relevant documents, there is no right of review. Seems like an awfully convenient way out to me, far less inflammatory than refusing to release documents on grounds of endangering legal privilege for example. I’m not making accusations or casting aspersions, hell I find it completely believable that there really was no correspondence on such matters. I’m just wondering what the compliance and audit processes are for FOI requests. Anyone know?

Sorry for the ranting, I’m kinda new to this whole reading of political documents thing.

Gungahlin Al11:01 pm 30 Mar 12

Isn’t this what happens when a media outlet (or someone else) has requested the same items through FOI, in order to rip the rug out from under any planned “exclusive”?

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