Why it matters

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.

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.

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.

In early-2012, Chris Vedelago, a reporter with The Age, began investigating the $415 million sale of 269,000 hectares of forestry land. It was one of the biggest single land transactions in Australian history at that time.

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.

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.

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.

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 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.