Freedom of information and Australian criminology

Ian Warren brings the discussion to Australia. He argues that FOI is underused for scholarly research on government in Australia – specifically criminological research – in large part because of the extensive powers granted to federal and state governments to block FOI requests and, in the case of disclosure, redact records to the point of revealing very little. Next to countries like Canada, Warren declares Australia’s FOI regime comparably weak. Criminal justice agencies like the Victoria Police find no shortage of ways to block disclosures and the appeals process tends to offer little in the way of remediation. Although not unique to Australia, the rise of public–private contracts in the Australian criminal justice system only makes matters of accessing info through FOI more difficult. Moving forward, Warrens calls for greater reflection on FOI in the Australian context. In particular, he calls for more empirical research about how FOI operates within particular criminal justice contexts in Australia, as well as for more work on how criminologists in Australia are actually using FOI for their work, if at all.