Labor has given George Brandis one week to hand over his diary, claiming his conduct is contemptuous of tribunal and court decisions ruling that a request to release it must be processed.
Brandis has rejected the allegation, claiming he is undertaking a “long and exhaustive” process of assessing the freedom-of-information claim.
The shadow attorney general, Mark Dreyfus, has been seeking Brandis’s diary since February 2014 to discover what consultation he held before cuts to his portfolio in the 2014 budget.
Dreyfus has had a string of legal wins, with the Administrative Appeals Tribunal rejecting refusal of the request in December 2015 and finding it had to be processed. In September 2016 a full federal court decision upheld the tribunal’s ruling.
On Thursday, Dreyfus’s lawyers wrote to the Australian government solicitor accusing Brandis of “continued avoidance of his obligation to process” the FOI request.
The letter said that Brandis has had six months since the full federal court decision to process the request but “has continued to behave in a manner that is contemptuous” of the decision and the FOI Act.
On 6 February Brandis’s lawyers replied to earlier requests from Dreyfus by saying that his office was working on the request but the process was “long and exhaustive ... for the reasons explained to the tribunal”.
Brandis had argued it would take too long to process because he would need to personally approve the release of every item.
Dreyfus’s lawyers said the tribunal had found in December that Brandis’s estimates of the work and time involved to process the request were “unconvincing”.
The letter threatened that if Brandis has not processed the request by 20 March, Labor will seek a court order to set a deadline for the attorney general, after which it could begin contempt of court proceedings.
The standard FOI processing time is 30 days but Dreyfus’s lawyers said that no request for an extension of time had been made.
“No explanation for this delay has ever been proffered nor have we been given any reasons why the application has not been processed,” the letter said.
In February, Brandis told Senate estimates that the allegation he was in contempt of court was “disgraceful”.
Brandis said the tribunal had not ordered him to release the diary, only declared that there was no practical reason to refuse the request and therefore the request had to be processed.
“There has been no non-compliance with any order of any court,” he said.
He said that, when the FOI had been processed by his office, there would be a response provided to Dreyfus.
