The government is pushing ahead with its bill which will make it even more difficult to access information under freedom of information. The government claims the bill is necessary because of AI bot campaigns and the burden on public servants processing the requests has grown too big (which is mostly because FOI requests are now checked by more people than ever – without reason – which has not only slowed down processing, but increased the hours each request is worked on. (It’s now four public servants for essentially what one public servant did under the Howard government.)

The government wants upfront payments and an end to anonymous requests among its changes for…reasons. There is no real justification for it. The bill doesn’t have a lot of friends in the parliament, and the crossbench have been leading the charge against it.

They’ll be holding a press conference on that issue later this morning.