Thanks to Opposition leader Sussan Ley, the government’s disgraceful attempt to squeeze the life out of the Freedom of Information Act is as dead as a herring.

A repost from 16 October 2025

In an elegant note in The Canberra Times of 13 October, Ley fillets the government’s attempt to narrow the scope of the FoI Act and says “The Opposition will stand firmly against these changes.” Thus, the Coalition and cross-benchers in the Senate are primed to flush the government’s proposals away.

The prime minister had urged the non-government parties to “engage constructively with this reform… because [it] is necessary if government is to function into the future”. Ley’s principled leadership has put this absolutist Albanese twaddle right in the toilet.

How did it come to this?

Well, those seeking to muzzle the FoI Act have, through a mixture of incompetence and slyness, undermined their cause.

Although the number of FoI requests has been more or less constant for a long time, some of the restrictions proposed reflect apprehensions of minister Mark Butler that many FoI requests “are AI bot generated”. But when the attorney-general’s department officials were quizzed about this at recent Estimates, the best they could say was that “some could have been supported by bots” and that “while it is difficult to be certain… an upward trend… in requests… appear to be from bots". That’s not evidence, it’s speculation and it got on........

© Pearls and Irritations