Australian Information Commissioner under s 93A of the
Freedom of Information Act
1982 (Cth) (the FOI Guidelines), a request under the FOI Act “… must provide such
information as is reasonably necessary to enable a responsible officer of the agency
or the minister to identify the document that is requested”. Your request does not
appear to meet this requirement.
In line with [3.89] of the FOI Guidelines , which state that agencies “… should
undertake a reasonable search on a flexible and common sense interpretation of the
terms of the request.” We have interpreted your request as being for the entirety of
the Senate Estimate briefing documents.
Timeframes for dealing with your request
The original due date of your request is 8 December 2022. With this letter being a
notice under section 24AB of the FOI Act, the time to process your request will be
stopped until we have completed this consultation with you regarding the scope of
your request, as per section 24AB(8) of the FOI Act.
Notice of intention to refuse your request
I am an officer authorised under s 23(1) of the FOI Act to make decisions in relation to
freedom of information requests.
I am writing to tell you that based on the information before me at this time, I am of
the view that the work involved in processing your request in its current form will
substantially and unreasonably divert the resources of the OAIC from its other
operations due to the substantial number of documents which fall within the scope
of the request (ss 24AA(1)(i) and 24AA(2)(b)(i)). This is called a ‘practical refusal
reason’ under s 24AA of the FOI Act.
On this basis, I intend to refuse access to the documents you have requested.
However, before I make a final decision to do this, you have an opportunity to revise
your request. This is cal ed a ‘request consultation process’ as set out under s 24AB
of the FOI Act. You have 14 days to respond to this notice in one of the ways set out at
the end of this letter.
Why I intend to refuse your request
Search and retrieval
Your request was referred to the relevant line area to confirm the location of the
documents within the scope of your request. Searching and retrieving the relevant
documents took
1 hour. It has taken a further
5 hours to compile the internal
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document bundle and document schedule for the documents within the scope of
this request.
Examination and assessment time
Based on our col ation and preliminary review of the documents within the scope of
your request, I have considered the time it would take the FOI decision maker to
examine, assess and edit the documents in scope in order to process and make a
decision on your FOI request.
We advise the fol owing:
• We have reviewed 8 documents totalling 91 pages within the scope of your
request to assess their complexity and any sensitivities or exemptions that
may apply to the particular documents (‘the sample’).
• The sample represents approximately 11% of the total number of the
documents within the scope of your request. These documents are of a range
of complexity levels. I am satisfied that the sample is an adequate sample of
all documents within the scope of your request.
• This assessment took approximately 0.5 minutes per page.
Accordingly, noting that there are
830 pages within the scope of your request we
estimate that it would take approximately
6.91 hours for the FOI case officer to
assess and examine the pages within the scope of the request.
Noting the complexity of the material within the sample, I estimate that it would take
an average of
3.5 minutes per page to:
• identify potential y sensitive material for OAIC line area consultation,
• prepare a schedule of this material; and
• send this material to relevant internal line areas; and
• review internal submissions received, engage in further any consultation
required, and mark up documents accordingly.
I therefore estimate these tasks would take a further
48.41 hours to complete.
Third party consultation
Having reviewed the sample for the purposes of this s 24AB letter, I have identified 17
third party businesses that it appears would need to be consulted under section 27
of the FOI Act. I estimate that it wil take on average 2 hours per third party to identify
relevant material, prepare third party consultation correspondence and review and
consider any submissions made by the relevant third party.
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I therefore estimate that it will take at least 34 hours to complete third party
consultation for these parties. Noting that this is a sample of approximately 11% of
the total document bundle, in order to process the request, based on the sampling
results, I estimate that it would take approximately
310 hours to complete third
party consultation for the entire document bundle. I note that you have excluded the
personal information of private individuals from the scope of your request. I confirm
that material regarding private individuals has not been included within this
calculation.
Decision making time
I conservatively estimate that it will take the FOI decision maker
2 hours to draft the
FOI decision and reasons for decision. Given the work of converting to PDF and
entering each of the documents on a schedule of documents has already been
completed during search and retrieval, I have not included this task in the estimate.
Combining these estimates for conducting search and retrieval, examination and
assessment, third party consultation, and the estimated time to draft the FOI
decision, I estimate that it would take a staff member of the OAIC at least
373 hours
to process your FOI request.
Diversion of resources
An estimate of processing time is only one of the considerations to be taken into
account when deciding whether a practical refusal reason exists. As well as requiring
a request to substantially divert an agency’s resources, s 24AA also requires the
request to unreasonably divert an agency’s resources from its other functions before
it can be refused under s 24.
The FOI Guidelines
identify matters that may be relevant when deciding whether
processing the request will unreasonably divert an agency’s resources from its other
functions. These include:
• the staffing resources available to the agency for FOI processing;
• the impact that processing a request may have on other work in the agency,
including FOI processing whether an applicant has cooperated in framing a
request to reduce the processing workload;
• whether there is a significant public interest in the documents requested; and
• other steps taken by an agency or minister to publish information of the kind
requested by an applicant.
The OAIC is a small agency, employing approximately 130 staff. Processing a request
of this size would substantially impact on the OAIC’s operations because of the
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limited number of people the OAIC has available to process FOI requests. This makes
it likely that staff wil be diverted from their other work in the OAIC, including:
• undertaking regulatory functions in both FOI and privacy;
• conducting IC review;
• delivering internal legal advice; and
• improving agencies’ processes for managing FOI requests.
Request consultation process
You now have an opportunity to revise your request to enable it to proceed.
Revising your request can mean narrowing the scope of the request to make it more
manageable or explaining in more detail the documents you wish to access. For
example, by providing more specific information about exactly what documents you
are interested in we will be able to pinpoint the documents more quickly and avoid
using excessive resources to process documents you are not interested in.
Before the end of the consultation period, you must do one of the following, in
writing:
• withdraw your request;
• make a revised request; or
• tel us that you do not wish to revise your request.
The consultation period runs for 14 days and starts on the day after you receive this
notice. Therefore, you must respond to this notice by
8 December 2022.
During this period, you can ask the contact person (see below) for help to revise your
request. If you revise your request in a way that adequately addresses the practical
refusal grounds outlined above, we will recommence processing it.
If you do not do one of the three things listed above during the consultation period
or you do not consult the contact person during this period, your request wil be
taken to have been withdrawn.
Ways you can reduce the scope of your request
There are a number of ways that you can reduce the scope of your request to enable
us to process it without unreasonably diverting our resources from our other
operations. These include:
• Limiting your request to the first five documents in order of appearance in the
final briefing pack to the Australian Information Commissioner; or
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• Limiting your request to the first five documents in order of appearance in the
final briefing pack to the FOI Commissioner.
We note that you have already made an FOI request for the index to these briefs. It
may be worthwhile for you to consider withdrawing this FOI request, and once you
have received the index for you to consider making a new FOI request for documents
which may be of interest to you.
Contact officer
If you would like to revise your request, or require assistance in revising the scope of
the request, or would like to discuss this matter in general, please contact me on (02)
9942 4296 or at xxxxx@xxxx.xxx.xx.
Yours sincerely
Molly Cooke
Lawyer
24 November 2022
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