The eSafety commissioner’s freedom-of-information staff worried one email every five minutes might “jam something”, according to documents which reveal the under-siege feeling that sparked controversial new proposals to clamp down on FoI in Australia.
The Labor government’s unpopular bill to impose charges for FoI requests and dramatically curtail what information could be released seems set to fail after the Liberal leader, Sussan Ley, said the opposition would vote against it – although the attorney general, Michelle Rowland, said she remained “absolutely committed” to the proposal.
Documents about the FoI proposal, released under FoI itself, reveal two government departments were concerned about a deluge of information requests from online tools.
When Rowland announced the contentious proposal in September, which would also prevent anonymous users from requesting documents, she told parliament eSafety was an example of “why the current system is broken”, with the online safety regulator receiving nearly 600 FoI requests in a short period of time from an “automated generator”.
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She said in September eSafety should focus on “protecting children rather than processing a mountain of frivolous FoI requests from online trolls”.
The “automated generator” was a pre-filled form on a free speech activist website that allowed users to send FoI requests for documents eSafety might hold about their X account.
Internal chat logs from February, released to transparency website Right to Know under freedom-of-information law, revealed panic setting in at the online safety regulator when the emails using this form began.
“[They] have created a new tool which has been facilitating applicants sending in a new FoI request every five minutes or so (50 FoIs since 1pm),” the 5.45pm message stated on 8 February.
“I am concerned that emails flowing in every few minutes may jam something and prevent work … I suppose our mailboxes are built to sustain that quantum but I wanted to check and make sure nothing needed to be done, just in case.”
An anonymised IT staffer at eSafety dryly responded: “If it’s one email every five minutes that isn’t a concern at all from an IT perspective.”
“I am concerned at the current pace, the emails might jam something. I am not sure how much data these mailboxes are built to hold,” the first staffer replied.
In estimates briefing documents released under FoI in February 2025, eSafety said it had an 1,800% increase in FoI requests in the 2024-25 financial year, which was “largely due to eSafety’s rising public profile and strong regulatory posture, combined with ongoing litigation”.
The documents stated that it was suggested to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner that there be reforms to the law to reduce these types of requests and “FoI-bombing”.
One staffer in February emailed colleagues saying that there were a higher than usual number of FoI requests via this online tool and “we should not comment further”.
“Of course, any discussion of this matter is in itself subject to FoI.”
In a separate batch of FoI documents, published by Rowland’s own attorney general’s department, a general counsel in an unidentified branch of the public service claimed in emails that they were receiving a large amount of “AI generated requests/chat GPT responses”.
The general counsel, in an email to senior officials in the department, said they “haven’t tracked precise volumes of these requests”, but claimed up to 50% of a sample of FoI requests to their office include AI-generated content.
They shared what they claimed were examples of AI-generated FoI requests or communications with their office from people seeking information.
Also included in the released documents were “high-level talking points” for ministers and government officials, formulated by the attorney general’s department, which referred to the statistics cited by that office about their sample of AI-generated requests. The talking points said the department had sought advice from Australia’s National Intelligence Community about the risk of foreign adversaries using FoI to access government information, in response to the push to ban anonymous requests.
The talking points said it was “not uncommon” for adversaries to seek information through legitimate processes like FoI, but claimed the government couldn’t say more because the intelligence advice was “classified”.
The Freedom of Information Act already has specific exemptions to allow the refusal of requests or redaction of information “affecting national security, defence or international relations”.
The bill will be examined in a parliamentary inquiry, with a first hearing to be held on Friday. The Alliance for Journalists’ Freedom, whose executive director, Peter Greste, will appear, called Labor’s proposed changes “disastrous for transparency and accountability”.
Greste said the changes would “make things more secretive, more expensive and more cumbersome”, calling for the bill to be scrapped entirely and for the government to progress methods to strengthen – not weaken – public access to information.
“If passed without amendment, this bill will further entrench the opacity that has made it so difficult for journalists to obtain timely and meaningful access to information,” Greste said.
