Legal expert tried to use freedom of information to shed light on Australia’s efforts to prevent reef being listed as ‘in danger’

This article is more than 1 year old

This article is more than 1 year old

A legal expert has criticised Australia’s freedom of information regime after spending two years and more than $1,000 trying to shed light on Australia’s enormous lobbying effort to prevent the Great Barrier Reef from being listed as “in danger”.

In 2014-15, Australian government officials spent more than $100,000 visiting and lobbying members of Unesco’s world heritage committee to keep the Great Barrier Reef off the “in danger” list.

A group of Australian and US environmental lawyers had found the dangers to the reef overwhelmingly met the criteria for such a listing, but Australia’s lobbying was ultimately successful.

The legal academic Prof Reece Walters, of Deakin University, wanted to understand how far Australia had gone in its taxpayer-funded campaign.

Former Liberal adviser appointed head of Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority Read more

Walters lodged a freedom of information request in August 2016 for relevant correspondence between the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade’s Great Barrier Reef taskforce and the Great Barrier Reef Marine Park Authority (GBRMPA).

He was given documents that were so heavily redacted “so as to render the information useless for any meaningful interpretation”.

“The request included minutes of meetings – on all occasions the entire minutes are deleted, leaving nothing but the agenda and day of meeting,” he said.

Walters asked the information commissioner to review the case. The GBRMPA argued the information was highly sensitive and would undermine its relations with foreign governments and organisations if released.

It argued the documents, if made public, would also potentially undermine upcoming negotiations with the committee over the status of the Great Barrier Reef in 2019-20.

Eventually, the information commissioner ordered the authority to disclose more – but far from all – of the material to Walters. But Walters told Guardian Australia the information is not what he originally wanted. Even if it were, the two and a half years of delays had rendered it almost useless.

“Who’s now interested in the ways in which the GBR was assessed by an international panel and how those particular members were in any way colluded or corrupted by government?

“It’s an old story, who cares? And that’s part of the subversion [of the FOI system], because if I had written this up when it was before the Senate, it might have got some traction.”

The freedom of information regime has long been criticised for its lengthy delays and high rates of refusals. Guardian Australia revealed earlier this year that FOI refusals were at their highest levels since records began in 2010-11 and that more than 2,000 requests had taken three months longer than the statutory timeframe for release.

Great Barrier Reef Foundation awards first funding – to a government agency Read more

Walters has extensive experience with freedom of information in the United Kingdom, which he said is far more open and conducive to transparency than Australia.

He said his experience made him fear for those with less ability to grapple with legal concepts and the vagaries of FOI.

“I’ve been wrestling with them for two-and-a-half years,” Walters said. “What does that mean for people who don’t have the legal skills, or knowledge of the system, or the ability to lodge appeals?”

In 2015, the then DFAT secretary Peter Varghese told Senate estimates that Australia had mounted a “whole-of-government” campaign to prevent the “in danger” listing for the reef.

“We are running a major campaign to prevent a listing of the Great Barrier Reef as being in danger,” he said at the time.

“There have been a number of assertions made about the management of the Great Barrier Reef and about its vulnerability that are not grounded in fact and which need to be rebutted.”