19 October 2015
Mr Jeff Waugh
By email: xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx@xxxxxxxxxxx.xxx.xx
Dear Mr Waugh
FOI REQUEST - REFERENCE NUMBER 2015-040
I refer to your email of 5 October 2015, in which you sought access to the following documents
under the
Freedom of Information Act 1982 (the FOI Act):
“…any review material regarding Mental As 2014. Including, but not limited to: documents,
internal correspondence, compiled audience feedback (anonymous), review of success
criteria, and determination to repeat the event in 2015.”
I am writing to clarify the scope of your request so that I may effectively and efficiently identify and
locate all relevant documents.
As you may be aware,
Mental As… 2014 was an organisation-wide, cross-platform initiative. It
involved arrangements with other networks and the project’s funding partner, the Society for
Mental Health Research (SMHR). The success of
Mental As… can be measured in various ways,
including financial outcomes (for instance, the level of funds raised for mental health research);
internal engagement; cross-divisional and external collaboration; and audience impact.
As presently drafted, your request is relatively broad and will require an extensive search through all
of the ABC’s hard and soft copy records, as well as the email records for all employees. While I have
a reasonably good sense of the type of documents you are interested in—most of which are likely to
be held centrally—the scope of the request requires me to undertake the extensive searches
indicated above for all documents held in any ABC office in Australia for documents relating to any
of the indicators that I have mentioned. In my view, this would involve a prohibitive amount of time
and resources. Once identified, there is a further body of work required to make an assessment as to
relevance and access.
I note that the development and implementation of
Mental As… was coordinated centrally by a
Project Team. The initiative was the subject of a formal review post-implementation. Some of the
outcomes of that review were reported publicly:
http://about.abc.net.au/press-releases/abc-
mental-as-reaches-5-9-million-australians-and-raises-1-47-million-for-mental-health-research/
Having regard to the above, it would be useful to clarify and refine the scope of your request, for
instance by limiting it to documents created by or provided to the
Mental As… project team, within a
specified date range. I recommend that you contact me to discuss the nature and scope of your
request. You can call me directly on (02) 8333 5304 or contact me by email at
xxxxx.xxxxxxx@xxx.xxx.xx.
Once you have clarified the scope of your request, the 30-day processing period will commence.
Please note that in seeking to clarify your request I am not making representations regarding the
existence of any documents, or whether access to them will be granted.
I look forward to hearing from you.
Yours sincerely
Juliana Walsh
Corporate Compliance Coordinator
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