The government says FOI costs too much to process. What they won't release is what the secrecy actually costs.
Freedom of Information law exists for one reason: so that the people who pay for the government can see what the government is doing with their money.
That's it. That's the whole job.
In 2025, the Albanese Government introduced a bill that would have made it easier to refuse FOI requests, extended the time agencies could take to respond, and made it more expensive for citizens to appeal. The stated reason: FOI processing costs too much.
They were right that it costs too much. They were looking at the wrong end of the ledger.
What the bill would have done
The Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025 proposed changes that FOI experts described as making the system harder to use, not easier. Longer delays. Higher barriers to appeal. More room for agencies to knock requests back without meaningful consequence.
It got killed in March 2026. Liberals, Greens, and crossbench senators — not exactly a regular coalition — prepared to vote it down. The government withdrew it rather than lose the floor.
Which tells you something about how much the non-government bits of Parliament thought of it.
The actual cost problem
Rex Patrick — former senator, professional transparency agitator, and the bloke who's spent more time in FOI battles than most public servants — has a different read on where the cost comes from.
According to Patrick, the problem isn't FOI itself. It's the operating culture inside government FOI teams, whose default setting is: start from nothing, give minimum disclosure, make the applicant work for every page.
When an agency refuses or delays, the applicant has to escalate. First to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner. Then, if that doesn't work, to the Administrative Review Tribunal. That costs money — lawyer's money, applicant's time, and yes, agency time too. But the agency gets to bill those costs back to the department budget. The citizen pays out of pocket.
So the cost the government was complaining about? A chunk of it is generated by the government's own resistance to releasing documents.
"Mr Albanese doesn't get it," Patrick wrote in May 2026. "Secrecy is so much more expensive than transparency."
Snowy Hydro: $600K to hide your own homework
Here's a worked example of how this plays out in practice.
Snowy Hydro — 100% owned by the Commonwealth — spent more than $600,000 in legal fees trying to prevent the release of its own cost reports. Not someone else's sensitive commercial information. Its own internal documents about a publicly owned project built with public money.
The documents eventually started coming out through other means. They showed what the government already knew: Snowy 2.0, announced in 2017 at $2 billion, is now tracking at $42 billion.
So the government spent $600K in lawyers' fees to delay public awareness of a $42 billion blowout. To be fair, $600K is a rounding error on $42 billion. The logic still holds.
The ART rebuke and AUKUS
In May 2026, the Administrative Review Tribunal rebuked the government over secrecy around AUKUS nuclear waste storage plans. Documents relating to where Australia might store nuclear waste — from submarines we haven't received yet, paid for with money we'll be borrowing for decades — were being kept from public view.
The Tribunal pushed back. The documents remain contested.
The pattern isn't complicated. When the information is inconvenient, the system defaults to delay. When the delay is challenged, it costs money. The government then points at the cost and says the system is too expensive.
Who this is for
FOI isn't just for journalists and researchers, though it's often painted that way by people who'd prefer the questions stop.
It's for the local councillor trying to understand a federal infrastructure decision that will run a highway through their suburb. It's for the small business owner who needs to know why their competitor got the government contract. It's for the nurse who wants to understand why her hospital's funding application was declined.
Every time an agency delays, redacts, or refuses, they're not just blocking a journalist's story. They're blocking the public's access to the evidence they paid for.
The transaction, plainly stated
You pay taxes. The government spends those taxes. You ask to see how. The government says it's too expensive to show you. You go to a tribunal. That also costs money. The government points at the tribunal costs as evidence that FOI is expensive.
Somewhere in that loop, the original question — what did you do with the money — gets lost.
The bill is dead, for now. The culture it was designed to protect is not.