Welcome to Best of the Week, written in Evandale, Tasmania, after a series of northwards hops before one big jump home. The Launceston-Melbourne-Canberra-Sydney-Launceston route deserves a name.
Happy World Beard Day.
Today: Taking the free out of freedom of information.
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A sledgehammer to the right to know
It was a week of crushed nuts, both hypothetical and metaphorical.
On Tuesday I was in Canberra for Free TV Australia’s lobbying showcase, Shaping a Nation.
Grabbing a sandwich in the airport cafe, they were having some kind of smoothie emergency. I listened to a worker ask a colleague: “If a blender wasn’t working and you had to crush walnuts, how would you do it?”
I’ve spent the rest of the week trying to figure out the best answer.
The colleague’s suggestion wasn’t where I’d have gone first: “You could put them in a big bag and jump up and down on them.” I guess you could.
The government claims that because it gets a lot of FOI questions, particularly now they can be AI-generated, it should charge a fee to answer them. Around the country, states which charge for FOI requests set fees ranging from $30 to $58. Which very much takes the free out of freedom of information. Chasing a single news story might take multiple requests, and often might not turn up anything of use.
Similarly I’ve always found it infuriating paying for ASIC information when reporting on the tax affairs of our big media companies. (Only yesterday afternoon did I discover the little known fact that journalists can apply to ASIC to get the info for free.)
Charging big fees to discourage AI-driven questions is, as investigative journalist William Summers told us on last night’s edition of MediaLand on ABC Radio National, “using a sledgehammer to crack a nut”.
The proposals emerged from the office of former communications minister Michelle Rowland, who is now the Attorney General.
Alongside the barrier of fees for FOI requests, which may well be negotiated away during the politics of getting the legislation through, comes a move to widen what might be considered as exempt Cabinet documents. Pretty much anything that might be discussed by the Cabinet in the future could fall under the definition.
Disappointingly, Rowland’s time up close to the media as communications minister appears to have left her with an appetite to reduce transparency.
Requesting information under FOI rules is a key investigative tool for journalists wanting information that governments do not want to share. Sports rorts and questionable MP expenses are among the news stories that have previously been uncovered thanks to the FOI process.
Funnily enough, the weird circumstances in which Rowland came to the conclusion (later reversed by her successor Annika Wells) that YouTube should be excluded from the forthcoming social media age gating laws was, I gather, among the most FOI-ed decisions of all time.
Unfortunately, the right to know is not something particularly entrenched in Australia’s administrative psyche. Although things may now have changed there too, I saw that a key difference between the US and Australia. Genuinely open democracies start with the assumption that all information should be freely shared unless there is a strong public interest reason why not. Australian institutions often start with an assumption that you shouldn’t share info unless you have to.
Increasing FOI transparency is something opposition parties tend to call for. Once in government they tend to lose the appetite.
There are other cultural barriers to the right to know. Australia’s protection for whistleblowers who go to the press in good faith is weak.
Whistleblowers helped bring to light scandals like Robodebt, war crimes and aged care neglect. Whistleblower Richard Boyle went through an eight year ordeal after assisting the ABC’s Four Corners show. It was reporting entirely in the public interest which uncovered unjustifiably heavy handed tactics being used by the ATO on small businesses.
Last week a judge finally found there were extenuating circumstances and spared him jail. But he never deserved to be in the system in the first place.
On Wednesday Michelle Rowland said she will reform the rules around public sector whistleblowing including establishing a Whistleblower Ombudsman. Will she protect whistleblowers who take their concerns to the media? We’ll see.
In case you missed it:
On Monday, we dug into the accounts of Enero and learned about the finances of its creative agency BMF:
On Tuesday, we looked at a bad start to the year based on the July data from Guideline SMI:
On Wednesday, I wrote about the Free TV lobbying expedition to Canberra:
On Thursday, we analysed the SBS Upfronts:
Unmade Index closes up as Nine enters what may be its last week in the $2bn club
The Unmade Index closed Friday fractionally up for the day, and for the week.
On a broadly positive day, Pureprofile was the best performer, closing the day up 5.1%. Vinyl Group was up by 4.2% regaining most of the 5.1% it lost on Monday.
The only stocks on the index to fall were Ooh Media, which lost 1.8%, and Southern Cross Austereo, which lost 1.3%.
Nine was up by 0.9% to close on a market capitalisation of $2.7bn.
It may be the last time that Nine ends a week with a market cap above $2bn. On Thursday of next week, shares in Nine go ex-dividend - the stock will start trading without the value of the $840m special dividend to shareholders from the Domain sale which will be distributed at the end of the month.
The Unmade Index closed on 583.2 points, a gain of 0.98% for the day. This outperformed the wider ASX which was up by 0.54% for the day.
More from Mumbrella…
’60% of search traffic has gone away': Hubspot's marketing playbook for a complex world
Sydney Sweeney drives 'unprecedented customer acquisition' for American Eagle
Time to leave you to your Saturday.
If you’d like to hear more from me, you can find last night’s FOI-led edition of Medialand in the usual podcast places. My co-host Vivienne Kelly was back from her latest diving expedition.
And Thursday’s edition of the Mumbrellacast featured my brief interviews in Canberra with Nine CEO Matt Stanton, Seven West Media Jeff Howard, Paramount president Beverley McGarvey and communications minister Annika Wells.
We also discussed the beginning of Upfronts season, and Vinyl Group’s latest developments. As you may have read on Mumbrella, about 10% of staff were made redundant during the week.
Speaking of which, I have a correction to last Saturday’s BotW post on Vinyl’s annual report: I stated: “In FY25 Mediaweek's revenue fell by 6.7%. Across the wider Vinyl Media group, revenue fell by 10.8%.” That was not correct. In fact those numbers are the amount the revenues would need to decline during this financial year in order for the company to write down the value of its mastheads. Within its annual report, Vinyl did not supply any year-on-year comparisons for the performance of its individual mastheads.
We’ll be back with more next week.
Have a great weekend.
Toodlepip…
Tim Burrowes
Publisher - Unmade + Mumbrella
tim@unmade.media
A very interesting story today. And yes, I agree that we need freedom of information.
Tim, do you think that EVERY person should be allowed to demand ANY INFORMATION. That would be likely to inundate the relevant Public Service workers. Doing that, there would be a strong expectation for it to be 'at-no-cost' which would significantly increase the PS headcount, increase Federal costs massive cost ... which no-one would expect.
But I did get a chuckle in your first para ... Grabbing a sandwich in the airport cafe, they were having some kind of smoothie emergency. I listened to a worker ask a colleague: “If a blender wasn’t working and you had to crush walnuts, how would you do it?”
Surely you could have advised that they crushed their own walnuts! (Only kidding.)
81 likes before I'd had the chance to read the BOTW newsletter as soon as I got notified it had been released and provide by own like. Is Unmade buying likes?