Monica Wilkie
Monica Wilkie is a Sydney-based freelance writer. She has worked at the Centre for Independent Studies, written for the country's major newspapers, appeared on Sky After Dark, and interviewed many for podcasts.
The Albanese government is trying, and failing, to overhaul the Freedom of Information (FOI) requests system. This is a terrible and absurd idea, but not nearly as terrible and absurd as the reasons it gives for why such changes are necessary.
Via our Pravda – the ABC – reported by Tom Crowley on 3 September 2025, we were told the Attorney-General, Michelle Rowland, said the changes were needed because “frivolous” requests were wasting our masters time and “vexatious” and “abusive requests” were rife.
Interesting. These are the exact arguments I and many others have made when fighting against new and existing incursions on free speech – hate speech laws being a prime example.
When you have a law on the books that allows those who are offended based on a particular immutable characteristic they happen to possess, “vexatious” claims are basically encouraged.
The government can hide everything because it is easier than answering to the people who install and pay for them?
This is the law, by the way, which punished a group of young university students for mocking the stupidity of an indigenous only computer room on the campus of a taxpayer funded institution.
This is the law that punished a journalist for questioning the – how to put this delicately and humorously – strange practice of indigenous self-identification.
Even the current head of the (should be defunded) Australian Human Rights Commission, Lorraine Finlay, co-authored a book explaining why 18C should be repealed. Yet, the vexatious time-wasting of our public masters, apparently, is acceptable when it comes to enforced racial harmony.
That is nothing to say of the numerous federal, state, and territory hate speech, discrimination, and nanny state laws.
All of which have seen a Catholic Archbishop pilloried for stating a reasonable, accepted until five minutes ago, position on marriage. Adults being infantilised to such a degree they can no longer be trusted to look at a packet of cigarettes without being immediately overcome with the desire to… make our own decisions. And, an entrepreneurial woman fighting for over four-years, at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars, to determine that the category of ‘woman’ means nothing and everything. None of this is vexatious or abusive enough to warrant an overhaul.
The last time there was a genuine effort to reform 18C, the then Race Discrimination Commissioner Tim Soutphommasane warned any watering down of the law could “signal” that racism and racial vilification had become acceptable. Those selfless beautiful bureaucrats, willing to waste their time on frivolous complaints to enforce racial harmony.
Even though the FOI bill looks set to fail thanks to Sussan Ley’s spasmodic fit of liberty, let’s not pretend she is acting out of principle. It was a federal Liberal government, after all, that made going outside illegal because a bat flew into a wet market in Wuhan. Imagine if Peter Dutton had won the last election, and the memorandum recommending the FOI changes, written by highly credentialed junior staffers, landed on his desk. The Liberals would be clutching their lab-grown diamonds, breathlessly muttering about our beleaguered public servants wasting time engaging with their people.
Mocking the stupidity of an indigenous only computer room on the campus of a taxpayer funded institution.
Australian citizens now, and for a long time I suspect, have been treated by our government as the enemy. We must ask permission to build a house, start a business, fish, fly, and drive. We are told when, where, and in what manner our children are educated. Every cent we touch is reported and confiscated, for the greater good, and if you make a reporting error, you are guilty until proven more guilty. As Steve Holland wrote here recently, Australia is likely to introduce a Digital ID: ensuring convenient compliance.
All these permission slips, licenses and registrations come at a price – morally and monetarily.
Telling, although unwittingly, Soutphommasane asked, when referring to the possibility of abolishing 18C, “Is this the kind of society we want to become?” Good question. Do we want to become a society in which the citizens must beg the government for everything? In which adults are treated like naughty children? Where the government can hide everything because it is easier than answering to the people who install and pay for them?
If The Hon Sussan Ley and the Greens stick to their word, and the FOI changes are defeated, I do not want our public masters to fret. Yes, they may see an increase in requests, but I can assure them, if they have nothing to hide than they have nothing to fear.
This article was originally published by Liberty Itch.
