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There were more than 4,000 reports of assaults in aged care homes last year, but the government won’t tell us whether they were by staff, residents or if any led to convictions.

Requests to the Minister and the Department of Health for information were refused.

There are thousands of complaints made every year about our elderly in aged care homes being abused, neglected and chemically restrained, but the government won’t tell us which facilities because of the ‘privacy’ of home owners.

So how can you choose a home for your loved one?

The public wants to know what the staffing ratios are inside our aged care homes but the government is fighting attempts to make staff numbers public.

More information:
https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/who-cares/10258290
https://www.abc.net.au/4corners/who-cares-part-two/10300264

More than a year after News Corp Australia journalist Annika Smethurst reported on secret discussions about the introduction of new powers that would allow the electronic intelligence agency, The Australian Signals Directorate, to spy on Australians, federal police officers raided her home. The seven hour search was described by police as part of an investigation into “alleged publishing of information classified as an official secret”. Police went through Smethurst’s home, belongings and electronic devices.

Smethurst remains in legal limbo unsure if she is under investigation or facing charges.

More information:

https://www.theaustralian.com.au/business/media/rude-awakening-when-the-cops-call-on-journalist/news-story/30bf0b02edce870e9c4577d62ee28b80

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/annika-smethurst-afp-raid-left-my-private-world-on-display/news-story/2bb4cefc340b848acf1d29ea69b87434

https://www.dailytelegraph.com.au/news/nsw/spying-shock-shades-of-big-brother-as-cybersecurity-vision-comes-to-light/news-story/bc02f35f23fa104b139160906f2ae709

Image credit: Kym Smith, staff photographer, News Corp Australia

Australian Taxation Office (ATO) whistleblower Richard Boyle spent months asking his superiors to investigate his concerns that the ATO was abusing its powers.  Boyle believed the ATO was using heavy-handed debt collection practices on individuals and small businesses including seizing money from their bank accounts, sometimes without their knowledge.

His concerns were dismissed and the tax office attempted to gag him. Boyle decided he had to go public with his concerns. Journalist Adele Ferguson told Boyle’s story in a joint investigation with The Age, the Sydney Morning Herald and the ABC’s Four Corners.

Bringing the truth to the public’s attention has had dreadful consequences: Boyle’s home was raided by the Australian Federal Police and ATO. His laptop and mobile phone were seized and he was told he had committed a crime in speaking to the media. He has had 66 charges laid against him and faces six life sentences in prison if found guilty. He described the past year as hellish. “I feel like I almost died from the stress. I feel like they almost killed me and were trying to kill me.”

Since the raid, a bipartisan Parliamentary Committee has issued a scathing report making 37 recommendations for tax office reform. Boyle has been described as arguably Australia’s most significant whistleblower.

More information:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2018-04-09/whistleblower-exposes-ato-cash-grab-targeting-small-businesses/9633140
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-03-06/ato-whistleblower-faces-161-years-prison-possibility/10872350

In early-2012, Chris Vedelago, a reporter with The Age, began investigating the $415 million sale of 269,000 hectares of forestry land by receivers for the collapsed managed investment scheme operator Great Southern to Canadian superannuation fund Alberta Investment Management Corp (AIMCo).

It was one of the biggest single land transactions in Australian history at that time.

In April 2012, Vedelago applied to the Foreign Investment Review Board under Freedom of Information laws for access to documents relating to its approval of the Great Southern land sale. In June that year, Vedelago was provided with redacted versions of just three out of 17 documents identified to be relevant to the case. On appeal, the redactions were eased but 14 of the 17 documents were still refused on grounds of commercial in confidence, trade secrets, and agency operations.

Vedelago and The Age appealed to the Australian Information Commissioner, who in November 2014 – 2 ½ years after the original application – allowed the release of some further documents, some still partly redacted, and upheld FOI exemptions for five documents.

No story was ever able to be published.

As a result, the Australian public has never been fully told the reasons why one of the largest ever property sales to a foreign owner was approved by the FIRB.

When The Age reporting team of Richard Baker and Nick McKenzie began investigating the awarding of a $1 billion government travel contract to a company run by the then federal Liberal Party Treasurer, they came up against a familiar barrier: the Freedom of Information system.

In August 2017, AOT was awarded the three-year contract for the provision of accommodation and travel booking services across the government. AOT was a subsidiary of a listed company, Helloworld, whose CEO was Liberal Party Treasurer Andrew Burnes. Former Federal Treasurer Joe Hockey, now Australia’s Ambassador to the United States in Washington DC, was a shareholder of Helloworld.

While researching links between Hockey and Burnes, Baker and McKenzie applied to the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade under the Freedom of Information Act for “[government] correspondence between Washington and Canberra on the issue of broader arrangements regarding provision of travel services throughout USA”. The time requested was from April 1 to December 31, 2017.

A decision on the application was repeatedly delayed for a range of reasons, including that it was commercial-in-confidence, would compromise DFAT operations overseas, releasing it would be contrary to the public interest, and that it was a “complex” case.

On appeal, “declassified” documents were made available, but these were so heavily compromised by redactions as to be virtually useless (see https://dfat.gov.au/about-us/corporate/freedom-of-information/Documents/dfat-foi-1812-F2112.pdf). It had taken more than six months between the original FOI request and the final release of the redacted documents, by which time an election had been held and the controversy had disappeared from the news agenda.

As a result, concerns over lack of probity in the awarding of the travel contract have avoided public scrutiny.

More information: https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/ambassador-joe-hockey-helps-out-travel-firm-20190219-p50yux.html

https://www.theage.com.au/national/hockey-s-helloworld-ties-demand-scrutiny-20190221-p50zei.html

Image credit: Sydney Morning Herald/Andrew Meares

Transparent, open and accountable government is a cornerstone of democracy, especially when it comes to determining if taxpayers’ money has been spent wisely.

Destination NSW, the state’s tourism and events agency, spent more than four years and hundreds of thousands of taxpayers’ dollars fighting efforts to find out how much it spends on major art exhibitions, musicals and events such as Vivid and the Sydney Festival.

The story began in April 2015 with a request under NSW Freedom of Information (FOI) laws for documents regarding expenditure on various cultural events, including some that had been critical and commercial failures.

Destination NSW deployed a team of lawyers, including a partner of a law firm and barrister, to resist the FoI request, employing tactics that were criticised by the NSW Civil and Administrative Tribunal (NCAT) which found, after endless hearings and three judgments, that the agency should hand over documents to the Sydney Morning Herald.

These documents revealed the agency asked for free tickets and corporate hospitality in exchange for state government funding, and funded events that failed to meet visitor targets.

Destination NSW also sought to avoid scrutiny of its spending decisions, citing “commercial-in-confidence”: a phrase used across government to rebuff freedom of information requests.

The NCAT found the agency had failed to carry out its obligations under NSW Freedom of Information laws and will hold another hearing to decide whether to refer it to the Ombudsman over its mishandling of the FOI application.

The fact this FOI request dragged on for more than four years also highlights the lengths government agencies will go to in order to avoid scrutiny.

More information:
https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/this-has-to-change-the-nsw-government-s-four-year-fight-to-keep-its-spending-secret-20190517-p51ogy.html

Image credit: Sydney Morning Herald/Brook Mitchell

In October 2018, journalist and author William Summers put in what he thought was an innocuous request to obtain a copy of a recent menu for the members’ dining room at Parliament House. He wanted to include details of the food and drink on offer at Parliament as colour for a book he was writing on politicians’ pay, allowances, and working conditions. The mundane request was stonewalled by the Department of Parliamentary Services.

The Department is not directly beholden to the FOI Act, but has its own similar information release scheme. It is obliged to process the request within 30 days. Two months later, it had done nothing. Summers persisted with his request, escalating it up the chain to senior officials and requesting an internal review of the department’s handling of the request. Eventually, more than three months after his initial application, the Department told him he could have the menus, but only if he agreed never to republish them.

As Summers says, the information was hardly “going to bring down the government”. Yet it took three months, repeated emails, escalation, requests for an internal review and prohibitions on republishing simply to obtain the lunch menu for the parliamentary dining room. Hardly a picture of transparency.

More information:
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2019/jan/02/how-a-flawed-freedom-of-information-regime-keeps-australians-in-the-dark

Sources were telling the ABC that children as young as 10 years old were being held in adult maximum-security police watch houses around Queensland. They were also being told that children were being held for weeks, and sometimes in isolation in so-called suicide smocks.

The ABC cultivated whistleblowers inside the system and inside government, and confirmed this was indeed happening. Right to information documents later provided a detailed insight into specific cases, including:

• A girl was found to be pregnant while locked up inside a watch house, but left there anyway
• A girl had a finger severed in a cell door
• An Indigenous with the cognitive functioning of a six-year old was held for days in a watch house
• At least three children had attempted suicide in a watch house
• A child was held for weeks in isolation.
• A boy was kept naked for days inside a cell.

The ABC also obtained emails showing the Queensland Government at the highest levels had been warned about the situation for more than a year, and had even been provided with some of the specific cases listed above.

An ABC Four Corners investigation interviewed the Child Safety Minister who admitted that she did not know of specific cases. The team also spent three days and nights filming inside Brisbane City Watch House.

The impact of the Four Corners investigation by reporter Mark Willacy was immediate and dramatic. The day after broadcast, the Queensland Premier ordered an investigation, and within four days she had announced the creation of a new Youth Justice Department. Within weeks all children had been removed from police watch houses in Queensland.

Without the help of sources and whistleblowers, and without the state’s Right to Information regime, this story would not have been told.

More information:
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-13/hold-the-watch-house-files/11046190
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-14/queensland-government-knew-about-child-safety-concerns/11107514
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-05-17/youth-justice-overhaul-in-wake-of-watch-house-revealations/11123238
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-06-18/boy-held-completely-naked-in-prison-watch-house-for-days/11207734
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2019-07-17/children-out-of-police-watch-house-brisbane-qld-government-says/11318202

The federal system of donations allows people and businesses to donate vast amounts of money and in a manner that delays for months, sometimes years, disclosure that they gave it. Contrary to global best practice, which requires real-time declaration of donations, Australia’s system allows entities to donate and for those donations to not appear on donation registers for extended periods.The federal system is also lagging behind many state systems: in Queensland donations must be declared within seven days; in Victoria they must declared within 21 days; in NSW during election periods donations must be declared within 21 days.

Attention was focused on the issue in Tasmania – which follows federal donations laws – in 2019 after it took 11 months for $500,000 in donations from the gambling lobby to the Tasmanian Liberals to be declared.

Another example is when then Liberal Prime Minister Malcolm Turnbull pledged $1.75 million to the Liberal Party ahead of the 2016 Federal Election. It is believed to be the largest donation in Australian political history. However, the money wasn’t received until after the election and in the next financial year, giving the Liberal Party 11 months before it was required to declare the money.