At the Woodford Folk Festival in 2012, Malcolm Turnbull was highly critical of the state of politics. He said the 60-second news cycle meant it had never been easier for people in public life to lie to the people and treat them with contempt. He acknowledged he was not an exception.
This trend has only worsened. But there is hope.
Information Commissioner Timothy Pilgrim, whose office lacks adequate funds and who has also been forced to act in two other roles concurrently: that of FOI commissioner and privacy commissioner.
In May 2013, Australia became a member of a new international body, the Open Government Partnership, which was created by eight nations, including the United States, Britain and Indonesia. It aims to "secure concrete commitments from governments to their citizenry to promote transparency, empower citizens, fight corruption, and harness new technologies to strengthen governance". It now spans 75 nations.
Each member nation commits to preparing, "with active engagement of government and citizens and civil society", a "national action plan" that makes "concrete commitments" that are "ambitious". The aims and commitments apply to the implementation of each national action plan.
Cartoon: Matt Golding
The partnership also provides an independent review mechanism, which assesses member nations' performance in preparing and implementing their plans.
This development offers a real prospect of restoring the integrity of our democracies.
The Abbott government, however, failed to prepare Australia's national action plan. Instead, it tried to abolish the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, created in 2010 as a key reform to significantly strengthen the government's openness and accountability, and in anticipation of the partnership's objectives.
Having failed to secure the Senate's support to abolish the office, the Abbott government achieved its objective by depriving the office of the funds it needed to perform its statutory freedom of information functions. Serious questions were raised at the time about the constitutionality of what had occurred. In so acting, the government rejected the partnership's objectives and commitments and its duty to govern in the public interest.
Such was the situation when Turnbull became Prime Minister in September 2015. Addressing the nation, he said: "We need an open government, an open government that recognises that there is an enormous sum of wisdom both within our colleagues in this building and, of course, further afield."
These were not hollow words. In November 2015, Turnbull wrote to the Open Government Partnership, advising that Australia was proceeding with its membership. His government created a website for the consultation process, published a draft national action plan and background statements, and sought responses from the public. In turn, civil society organisations and individuals became involved.
The Turnbull government also called for nominations from civil society for positions on an interim working group, and appointed Law Council of Australia chairwoman Fiona McLeod, SC, to it.
Over the next 12 months, the working group, individuals and civil society worked together to improve the draft national action plan, adding the partnership's "grand challenge" – "measures that address corruption and public ethics, access to information, campaign finance reform, and media and civil society freedom" – and specific commitments to address those matters.
In all, the national action plan details 15 commitment topics, including political funding and a national integrity commission. It identifies those to be involved in implementing each commitment, from government and civil society.
The plan also reflects the government's awareness of the importance of the Office of the Australian Information Commission's statutory role in implementing the plan.
During the consultation, the government announced, in last year's budget process, that it would not abolish the information commissioner's office and would restore the FOI statutory functions that had been passed on to other agencies. It did not, however, restore its necessary funding.
Civil society groups took up this issue and the necessary commitment was made in the action plan: "The government is committed to ensuring the adequate resourcing of the [information commissioner's office] to discharge its statutory functions, and provided funding for this purpose over the next four years in the 2016-17 budget."
Whatever the government's actual intention in the previous budget, resourcing was well short of what is required and extra resources will be needed to allow the office to perform its new responsibilities under the action plan. We hope the Auditor-General's audit of FOI, now under way and scheduled to be published in June, will help assess whether the next budget's provisions are adequate.
Tim Smith, Stephen Charles and David Harper are former justices of the Supreme Court of Victoria, and members of the Accountability Round Table.