A regulator set out to check whether government agencies publish the documents they release under freedom of information law. To do it, they used our collection.
Earlier this year the Freedom of Information Commissioner set out to answer a straightforward question. When Australian Government agencies release documents under the Freedom of Information Act 1982, do they publish them where the public can find them? And do they do it on time?
The law requires agencies to publish documents released in response to an FOI request within 10 working days. This publication is called a disclosure log. Between January and March 2026 the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC) reviewed the disclosure logs of 30 agencies. Those agencies accounted for 75% of all non-personal FOI requests granted in 2024-25.
To check the agencies’ work, the OAIC needed a record of what had actually been released and when. For part of the review, they used Right to Know.
This not-for-profit website is an online tool for members of the public to make FOI requests and then publishes all the responses from the agency, including the documents released in response to the request and the date that access to the documents was given to the applicant.
Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, Disclosure log desktop review 2026
Right to Know appears in the review’s methodology three times. The reviewers used it to confirm that agencies meant what the OAIC assumed when they recorded an access date. They used it to test timeliness at three agencies whose disclosure logs carried too little information to test any other way. And they used it across all 30 agencies to check whether released documents had reached the disclosure log at all.
On that measure, 9 of the 30 agencies fell short. They had not published information for some or all of the Right to Know requests examined.
Right to Know is named more than thirty times across the report and cited in its footnotes. Our collection was there when someone needed it.
The second library
Right to Know was not the only outside collection the reviewers drew on. Sixteen of the agencies recorded only an access date on their disclosure log. For those, the OAIC turned to the Wayback Machine, run by the Internet Archive. The Archive describes itself as a “Digital Library of Free & Borrowable Texts, Movies, Music & Wayback Machine”.
The method is simple. Compare an archived snapshot of a disclosure log against the version live today. Entries that appear now but were missing then were added later than the law allows.
For four agencies, the method did not work. No usable snapshots of their disclosure logs had been taken during 2025, so their timeliness could not be assessed at all.
30
agency disclosure logs reviewed, covering 75 per cent of non-personal FOI requests granted in 2024-25
20
of those 30 agencies had not published every entry within the required 10 working days
4
agencies could not be assessed for timeliness at all, because no record of their older pages survived
We think that last number is a perfect reason for keeping what we do. What had been preserved could be measured. What had not been preserved could not be measured, by the regulator or by anyone else.
The review also found that 16 of the 30 agencies had not published all the information they were required to publish. The OAIC has made four recommendations to help agencies improve and is updating its guidance for them. We look forward to all agencies implementing these recommendations.
What we keep
The OpenAustralia Foundation is a public digital online library. We collect records of Australian democracy, we keep them, and we make them available to anyone who wants them. There is no card and no need to explain why you are asking.
We have written before about why democracy needs a library. This is what ours holds.
Our collections span four places.
Planning Alerts holds planning applications from councils across Australia, so people can find out what is proposed to be built near them.
Right to Know holds freedom of information requests made by members of the public, with the agencies’ responses and the documents they released. Every request is public from the moment it is made, and it stays public.
They Vote for You holds the record of how members and senators have voted, grouped into policies so a voting history can be read rather than merely counted.
OpenAustralia.org.au holds the record of what is said in the Australian Parliament, drawn from Hansard and put into a form that can be searched, linked to and followed.
None of this is unusual work for a library. A library decides what is worth keeping. It describes each item well enough that people can find it, keeps the collection in order, and hands things over when asked. Most of what we do is the unglamorous middle part.
We are a small team, and the collection grows because people use it. Every request made through Right to Know adds to our collection. Make your request today.
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