Former attorney-general George Brandis' three-year fight to keep his ministerial diary secret cost taxpayers just over $168,000, it has been revealed.



The amount was disclosed, finally, nine months after Labor sought information on the total cost of the case. The response was posted just in the last week, months after other answers to questions on notice from May 2017's Estimates hearings were published by the attorney-general's department and just a matter of weeks after Brandis resigned from the Senate to take up the role of the next high commissioner in London.

To recap, in the Abbott government's first budget, there were millions of dollars cut from legal aid funding and the arts sector, both in Brandis' portfolio.

Labor's shadow attorney-general, Mark Dreyfus, filed a freedom of information request for Brandis' Outlook calendar for the period of September 2013, until May 2014 to see if Brandis had met with those two sectors prior to the cuts being announced.

But Brandis – then the minister responsible for freedom of information law in Australia – fought to keep his diary a secret every step of the way.

Brandis refused to release it to Labor, and subsequently lost several appeals to the Administrative Appeals Tribunal, the Federal Court, and then the full bench of the Federal Court in September 2016.

It wasn't then until almost one year ago in March 2017 that Brandis' office finally released the diary and it revealed... not a lot. Except it did show that Brandis had not met with groups affected by the budget cuts.