If passed, the bill would have introduced fees for some FOIs and restrict the reasons someone can make a request.
The bill faced criticism both inside and outside Parliament, and had no support from other parties.
Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher said the bill would be revised and reintroduced.
FOI requests
FOI requests are a way to ask for access to government documents and records. They are governed by the Freedom of Information Act.
Journalists typically use FOIs to access data, or find out how the Government made a particular decision.
The majority (72% in 2023/24) are from individuals seeking their own personal information from Government agencies.
Information from intelligence agencies and Cabinet documents (meetings of senior ministers) aren’t accessible.
Government data shows Australians submitted an average of 38,000 FOI requests each year from 2015 to 2021.
According to a 2022 report from The Centre for Public Integrity, the proportion of claims granted in full fell by more than 30% from 2011/12 to 2022, while the number of claims refused in full increased by 50%.
The Government has since amended how staff report their response to claims, allowing more FOIs to be listed as completed in part.
Proposed bill
The Government introduced the bill in September 2025 to “strengthen” the FOI system, arguing the current framework is “stuck in the 1980s,” before emails and smartphones.
Changes included:
- Fees for requests, excluding those for personal information
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- Expanding what documents are covered by ‘cabinet confidentiality’
- Banning anonymous requests
- Allowing government departments to refuse requests that would take longer than 40 hours to process.
The Government said its employees spent more than a million hours processing FOI requests in 2024, partly because “modern technology has made it possible to create large volumes of vague, anonymous, vexatious or frivolous requests.”
The bill also addresses what Attorney-General Michelle Rowland described as FOIs by “anonymous or nefarious offshore actors”.
When asked in October 2025 for evidence of foreign actors exploiting the system, Rowland’s office didn’t cite specific examples.
Motion
Public Service Minister Katy Gallagher moved a motion in the Senate on Thursday to pull the bill.
She said the Government was “taking this step because we understand that it does not have the support of the Senate”.
The Government has a majority in the House of Representatives, but needs the support of other parties to pass bills in the Senate.
Gallagher said they would “negotiate” to “progress” the bill.
Response
No political parties, except for the Labor Party which introduced the bill, supported the FOI changes.
Opposition Senate Leader Michaelia Cash called the scrapping of the bill a “victory,” describing it in a post to X as “a blatant bid to price Australians out of transparency”.
Greens Senator David Shoebridge also wrote on X that the Government had “finally admitted defeat and scrapped its toxic Freedom of Information bill after massive community backlash and almost unanimous opposition”.
