Employee information provided to ballot agents in Enterprise Agreement bargaining
Dear Department of Defence,
This is a request for information under the Freedom of Information Act.
I request the document(s) which describe the data provided to the external organisation(s) responsible for conducting the ballot(s) for all Enterprise Agreements put to staff for a vote.
The scope of this request is limited only to those ballots undertaken for enterprise agreements which were proposed to take effect after 30 June 2014.
The document shall describe the data given to the ballot agent. For example, employee name, employee identification number, employee email address, etc. I exclude the data for specific employees here; I am only after the 'meta-data'.
If it assists you to treat this as an administrative request for information I encourage you to do so. Otherwise, please consider this a formal FOI request.
Yours faithfully,
James Smith
UNCLASSIFIED
Good morning
Thank you for your email. Your email has been forwarded for consideration/action.
Kind regards
FOI Operations
[email address]
(02) 6266 2200
http://www.defence.gov.au/foi/
UNCLASSIFIED
Good morning Mr Smith
I refer to your email dated 16 February 2017 where you sought information regarding Defence's Enterprise Agreement. Specifically, you sought:
"document(s) which describe the data provided to the external organisation(s) responsible for conducting the ballot(s) for all Enterprise Agreements put to staff for a vote.
The scope of this request is limited only to those ballots undertaken for enterprise agreements which were proposed to take effect after 30 June 2014.
The document shall describe the data given to the ballot agent. For example, employee name, employee identification number, employee email address, etc. I exclude the data for specific employees here; I am only after the 'meta-data'."
As suggested in your request, Defence agrees to provide a response to you administratively, that is outside the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act 1982.
The Director of Defence of APS Workplace Relations has the responsibility for development of the new Defence Enterprise Agreement. This includes organising for employee ballots to be conducted.
The Director of Defence APS Workplace Relations has advised that each of the three employee votes held (25 February - 1 March 2016, 28 April - 3 May 2016 and 1 - 6 December 2016) voting was conducted by Orima Research which used a voting database established on an online server, located in a secure environment within Australia. This database was based on the eligible voting roll prepared by Defence and passed by hand from APS Workplace Relations to the ORIMA Research Returning Officer. For validation purposes, the data in the eligible voter roll only included the following information - employee's first name, last name, date of birth, and PMKeYS Employee ID.
I trust this satisfies your request.
Kind regards
FOI Operations
[email address]
(02) 6266 2200
http://www.defence.gov.au/foi/
Dear Ms Hanna
Thank you for providing this information so quickly.
I confirm withdrawl of this FOI request.
Yours sincerely,
James Smith