Whistleblower Files Complaint Against Australia's Home Affairs For Breaching FOI Act

An anonymous whistleblower has accused Australia's Home Affairs Department of breaching the freedom of information (FOI) law, which allows citizens to freely access any government records, by failing to respond to a document request within the allotted time frame

MOSCOW (UrduPoint News / Sputnik - 25th October, 2019) An anonymous whistleblower has accused Australia's Home Affairs Department of breaching the freedom of information (FOI) law, which allows citizens to freely access any government records, by failing to respond to a document request within the allotted time frame.

The Home Affairs Department had been embroiled in a prolonged pay dispute with its employees since 2014. In 2016, the Fair Work Commission began arbitrating the dispute, after the department's employees went on strike to demand better pay and working conditions.

"I contend that each and every Departmental officer responsible for failing to adhere to the requirements of the FOI Act in respect of my FOI application have engaged in disclosable conduct for the purposes of the Public Interest Disclosure Act 2013 because they have contravened the requirements of ... the Public Service Act 1999," the whistleblower complaint said, as quoted by the Guardian Australia news outlet.

The whistleblower had filed a request to the Home Affairs Department for internal records relating to the staff pay dispute in February.

After the whistleblower did not receive a response for 130 days 100 days longer than is typically allowed under the FOI law they lodged a complaint against the department.

The department finally released the document in July, within two weeks of the complaint. However, it had been redacted to the point of near uselessness, the outlet said.

The complaint is yet to be resolved, as the Home Affairs Department has requested an extension until 2020, due to a parallel ongoing investigation that Australia's information watchdog, the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, has launched into the department's systematic failures to deal with FOI requests on time.

The Home Affairs Department receives the highest number of FOI requests among all other government agencies in Australia. A department spokesperson said the agency was seeking to improve current compliance rates, which were at 82.5 percent for the 2019-2020 financial year.