The federal body considering a $900m loan to Adani is “one of the most secretive agencies I’ve ever come across”, a leading scholar on freedom of information (FoI) law says.

The Northern Australia Infrastructure Facility (Naif) continues to resist releasing basic details of its board meetings, saying that, like private banks, it needs to keep these secret and citing concerns about the “cyberbullying” of directors and targeting by protestors.

Rick Snell, the deputy dean of the University of Tasmania’s law school, said the Naif was virtually throwing the “kitchen sink” into its bid to refuse an FoI request by Greenpeace, which is appealing to the office of the information commissioner.

But none of the Naif’s arguments cut the mustard for a body charged with investing $5bn in taxpayer money, and which should expect “a higher threshold of public accountability”, Snell said.

“I think they scramble for whatever excuses they can not to release information and go out of their way, more so than any other agency I’ve encountered,” he said.

Snell’s withering assessment comes ahead of a Senate inquiry into the Naif, which the federal opposition has also asked the federal auditor general to examine.

The Naif has sought to justify its secrecy by citing the public attention given to the Adani project, which has become a lightning rod for environmental campaigners .



The chair of Naif, Sharon Warburton, had a speech interrupted by an anti-Adani protester at a conference in Cairns last week where there was already a heavy security presence.

Media sources have told of security preventing a news photographer from taking a photo of the outburst, and that journalists were told they weren’t allowed to record Warburton’s speech.

Snell said if the Naif prevailed in its arguments against releasing “a fairly innocuous document” with now outdated details of a meeting, it would be easy for other government agencies to adopt the same “invalid” reasons to avoid future disclosure.



“If you sat down a group of grade six primary schoolkids and asked them to decide whether this redundant piece of information, about a meeting and its venue, is secret and deserves to be protected or not, I think it’s quite obvious what the answer would be,” Snell said.

The “hypothetical possibility of a security threat” was not good enough a reason for most agencies, he said. “If the protesters do disrupt these meetings, if the protesters do harass the members coming to the meetings, you’ve got a whole host of criminal and civil procedures which can be applied against the protestors.

“You can’t and shouldn’t operate on the assumption there’s going to be automatic illegality, especially when you know you’ve got those legal mechanisms in place.”

If “cyberbullying” of directors was occurring, it was “up to [the agency] to present the evidence” it should be grounds to protect information, Snell said.

“[But] in the context of this particular document, I just can’t fathom what bullying you would be subject to apart from the criticism that you’re being over-secretive.”

Snell said it was “ludicrous” for the Naif to compare itself to a private bank. There was “a fundamental difference” given the scale and sensitive nature of the public spending at stake and that it had no “commercial or even governmental competitors”.

A closer analogy was the Reserve Bank, which published minutes of its monthly meetings to make its reasoning available for public scrutiny, Snell said.

“[But] this body [the Naif] shows no inclination to publish even in retrospect their decision making processes and the reasons for it.”

Jason Clare, the federal Labor shadow for resources and northern Australia, said these were “basic questions and the NAIF should just answer them”.

“They are responsible for $5bn of taxpayers money. I think Australians have a right to know what’s going on,” he said.

The Naif said it hoped Greenpeace would drop its request for the document because it was out of date. But Snell said this was normally “precisely the reason the information commissioner would release it, because it has now lost all sensitivity”.

Greenpeace, which had its FoI request knocked back by the Naif in January, then launched a campaign to flood the agency with more than 1,500 similar requests from people using a tool on its website.

Snell said he thought that campaign was “counter-productive and threatens to undermine the FoI Act” and agencies’ adherence to it.

But the Naif’s default position “with information locked up” was not the intention of the FoI Act or of parliament, which did not make it exempt from FoI, he said.

“If the government and parliament really wanted this agency to be as secretive as this, they could have easily put it on the schedule of exempt agencies under the act.

“So this agency is claiming a special position in the public sector which the parliament and the government didn’t intend for it to have.”