Dear Australian Federal Police,

I request any document in the period 1-31 August 2023 inclusive sent to or received from the ACT government, or part thereof (including ministers' offices), relating to the Sofronoff Inquiry.

SES includes acting SES.

Exclusions: documents sent to or from the ACT ODPP, non-SES personal information, direct phone numbers, and non-public email addresses excluding the domain.

Yours faithfully,

Reasonable Prospects

Dear FOI (Libby),

Thanks for your letter.

I'm not sure if my reply about the Sofronoff-ish requests made it to you. I can't seem to find a record of it, but your letter implies you did receive it. Apologies if this reply covers the same ground / in case there is a miscommunication because of missing corro or such.

If a practical refusal is made on the basis of combined scopes I will dispute it. Also, the public interest in the documents I am seeking somewhat outweighs the practical refusal considerations. Also, a request can't be combined if it's out of time. If I limit the scope to one of the subrequests and wait out the 30 days, I can then request the second subrequest, etc. The end result is AFP producing the same documents but putting in more effort to do so. Agreeing to one bigger scope, even if a practical refusal might succeed, results in less overall effort for AFP.

Regarding "potential revision":
- There is no requirement to limit the scope by business area. My scope is limited by subject matter. That the scope is limited in a way that does not fit neatly into AFP's org chart does not make it broad. It is not a broad scope (a single month of documents to/from SES about a specific topic)
- ACT Policing is not a "large organisation with many SES staff". According to the 2024-24 annual report it has a bit under 1,300 staff. Of those, only 6 are SES (https://police.act.gov.au/about-us/struc...). Even factoring in multiple acting arrangements in August 2023, it is unlikely to be more than 10 SES staff.
- I agree to limit the Commonwealth government to parliamentarians (including ministers) and their staff, provided this includes a parliamentarian via another department (for example, if AFP's contribution to a ministerial brief went AFP-AGD-AG, it still counts, but if it only went AFP-AGD, it doesn't).
- For the SES-limited scopes, sender can be determined by AFP FOI. I don't know the names of the individual SES in ACT Policing in August 2023 but AFP FOI can readily determine that and use those names to search by sender etc.
- The parameters for searches of "Sofronoff" are limited by date and limited to internal correspondence. I am willing to further limit this scope to emails and Teams chats in the relevant dates.
- In terms of training documents, I am willing to limit the scope to training documents in force as at 1 August 2023, 1 January 2024, 1 July 2024, 1 January 2025, and 30 June 2025.
- The letter doesn't appear to contend with the scope about a policy on threshold to charge

Yours sincerely,

Reasonable Prospects