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When the public has a right to ask, how much of government should be organised around the obligation to answer?
An application is rejected on merit. The applicant asks to see how that was decided.
What follows is a contest over what was recorded, what can be found, what must be justified and what the public is ultimately permitted to know. Freedom of information law promises that the process is answerable. But the people who made the original decision (or made the decision-making machine) help determine how much of it is disclosed for public view.
This simulation puts you inside that system. FOI law attempts to make government legible from the outside: it creates rights of access, directs decision-makers toward disclosure and requires secrecy to be justified. Yet those rights are administered from inside the institutions being asked to reveal themselves. The same system that promises access also regulates search, scope, consultation, charges, extensions, exemptions and refusal. For some records, those mechanisms make disclosure manageable. For a request that seeks to reconstruct how a politically sensitive decision was reached, procedure becomes as consequential as the right itself.
Officials develop habits about what to record, how to phrase advice, which channels leave a trail and which sensitivities are better handled outside the reach of the legislative oversight framework. These habits may not begin as intentional avoidance or concealment. They may come from concerns that prioritise candour, workload or the pressure to deliver. The cumulative effect is a decision that becomes progressively harder to explain.
Participants will take the position of an applicant, an FOI officer, a program official, an adviser, a lawyer, a journalist or a reviewer. Each position approaches the scenario from a different perspective. One sees an unexplained rejection. One sees an overwhelmed records system. One sees tentative advice that was never intended to survive outside the room. You will have to decide, from inside your own role, what democratic accountability actually demands — and whether that demand is compatible with the interests you hold.
If officials respond to transparency obligations by recording less, has the law produced openness or changed the shape of secrecy? And when the record says a decision was merit-based, how much must exist behind that statement before it means anything?
You may take a second look at whether transparency is a proxy for trust.
Characters
12
Scenes
4
Preparation time
2 hours
Engagement time
2 hours
FOI is written as legislation, but experienced as a system. Legislation becomes policy. Policy becomes workflow. Workflow becomes human judgment. Human judgment produces disclosure, delay, redaction or refusal.
The Commonwealth freedom of information regime was reformed in 2010 to emphasise a pro-disclosure objective. A pro-disclosure objects clause was inserted. Ministerial conclusive certificates were abolished. Certain factors — embarrassment, loss of confidence in government — were expressly ruled out of the public interest test. An Information Commissioner was created to oversee the arrangement. In theory, the balance shifted.
While the reforms strengthened accountability pathways, other features of the system work against them. Procedural provisions introduce frictions that can impede disclosure. The interpretation of the tests set out in the legislation happens largely at the agency level. Around the formal rules, a second system develops: which sensitivities are handled by phone, how advice is worded so that it can later be released without ramifications, which exemption is easiest to sustain, what is better not written down at all. The operational understanding of what the law requires is reflected in the disclosure decisions and in the way records are created in the first place.
The public servants who work this way do not experience it as concealment. They may hold a sincere and defensible position: that candour is necessary to good executive performance, and some measure of confidentiality is necessary to candour. From inside government, disclosure can compete with sincere commitments to administrative efficacy, frank advice and the delivery of public value. This is why maladministration and conscientious administration can sometimes look similar from the public side of the institutional boundary.
The legitimacy of the freedom of information system requires mechanisms that follow through on a commitment to the idea that people can participate in the decision-making process itself. In order to participate, a balance must be struck about the extent and terms on which records are available to the public.
The result of policy that does not serve these interests can be a regime that functions partly as an instrument and partly as a symbol: important as a statement of the government's commitment to openness, but capable of becoming decoupled from practice. It can generate incentives contrary to its purpose. If material that is written down can later be disclosed, one reliable way of protecting deliberation is to record less of it. A transparency regime can therefore change not only what government releases, but what government allows itself to know on the record.
Enter the simulation
Adopt the role of a character and interact with your counterparts in the context of this scenario.
Through a single decision, the simulation tests the trade-offs between administrative efficacy, public accountability and institutional legitimacy. It asks whether the bureaucracy is operating as an instrument of the law, as a culture that has internalised its purposes, or as a set of practices that preserve the forms of transparency while weakening its capacity to make government accountable.
