http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/02/20/the-victorian-opposition-and-foi-bungling/ now with extra source Sun, 12 Feb 2012 02:48:10 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.2.1 http://www.crikey.com.au/2009/02/20/the-victorian-opposition-and-foi-bungling/#comment-4088 Dave Liberts Thu, 01 Jan 1970 10:00:00 +0000 #comment-4088 I used to work for a polly who loved his FOI fishing trips, but the nature of the request here is clearly nuts. A cleverly worded FOI application can deliver a bunch of material (including some real dynamite depending on how well vetted the pile has been) but something this crude clearly deserved the result it got. My favourite FOI tale is the time my boss demanded a bunch of documents relating to a government decision to buy a loss-making shopping centre in his electorate for the purposes of adding the land to an adjacent primary school. My boss smelt a bizarre deal and requested all info about any valuations of the shopping centre. By the time the documents came through, the site had been purchased. My boss figured there was no way they'd have released a valuation, so I was given the job of going through the pile to find any reference to the valuation so he could put in a more specific request for the valuation itself. Then, three pages in to a 200 page pile, there it was. A valuation saying don't pay more than 1.3 million, and literally 4 days earlier the government had announced a 3.95 million purchase. Coincidently, the trigger for parliamentary committee scrutiny of the deal was if the price tag was over $4million. The tale was told in Parliament and I have referred to it in the only by-lined article I've ever had in Crikey. The point is, you can go so far with FOI before it becomes useless. All it takes is some brains. I used to work for a polly who loved his FOI fishing trips, but the nature of the request here is clearly nuts. A cleverly worded FOI application can deliver a bunch of material (including some real dynamite depending on how well vetted the pile has been) but something this crude clearly deserved the result it got. My favourite FOI tale is the time my boss demanded a bunch of documents relating to a government decision to buy a loss-making shopping centre in his electorate for the purposes of adding the land to an adjacent primary school. My boss smelt a bizarre deal and requested all info about any valuations of the shopping centre. By the time the documents came through, the site had been purchased. My boss figured there was no way they’d have released a valuation, so I was given the job of going through the pile to find any reference to the valuation so he could put in a more specific request for the valuation itself. Then, three pages in to a 200 page pile, there it was. A valuation saying don’t pay more than 1.3 million, and literally 4 days earlier the government had announced a 3.95 million purchase. Coincidently, the trigger for parliamentary committee scrutiny of the deal was if the price tag was over $4million. The tale was told in Parliament and I have referred to it in the only by-lined article I’ve ever had in Crikey. The point is, you can go so far with FOI before it becomes useless. All it takes is some brains.

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