Governments from time to time contend that information is "commercial in confidence" when withholding details about how public money is spent.
But do they have a legitimate reason for keeping dollar figures under wraps?
The NSW government has used the technique to suppress details about land sales in Newcastle and more recently to keep secret the cost of bringing a World Surf League event to the city.
City of Newcastle used commercial in confidence as the reason for not revealing how much it was spending on renting and fitting out its new offices in Newcastle West before disclosing the costs under community and political pressure.
University of Newcastle governance expert and researcher Professor Roberta Ryan says commercial in confidence is over-used, and governments may be doing themselves an injustice by burying information.
"There's a real tension between good public administration that encourages transparency and allowing people to understand and enable good decision-making and protecting the commercial intel of businesses," Professor Ryan said.
"Governments over the years, of course, have increasingly moved to using commercial in confidence as a way of making the rationale for their decision-making a bit more opaque."
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She said commercial in confidence made more sense in large, complex infrastructure projects, but there was no reason most costs should not be made public.
"As a general principle, of course, all this information should be made available to people.
"In big commercial projects like building roads or bridges or tunnels, they're very complex and ... it's quite hard for the general public to understand what's included and what's not.
"I think governments are often reluctant because you need a lot of expertise to interpret these things, but it doesn't mean they shouldn't go to greater lengths to make it clear."
Professor Ryan, the inaugural director of the University of Technology Sydney's Institute for Public Policy and Governance and a former director of the UTS Centre for Local Government and Australian Centre of Excellence for Local Government, said governments should try harder to educate the community.
"When people see these numbers in isolation, they think it's a fortune, and it is to regular citizens," she said.
"We do things with local governments, and when you look at their overhead costs, they're mostly a very minor proportion of their overall outlay.
"Many councils have budgets of hundreds and hundreds of millions. It's a lot of money, but in context it's not. And they're audited."
Australia was on par with the United Kingdom and US when it came to financial transparency, but countries such as Estonia and Finland were taking a "public stand" about transparency.
"The more people understand how governments work and what they spend their money on as a proportion of their overall expenditure, and the more transparent governments can be, the higher regard communities have for them, because over time it builds trust.
"When there's higher levels of trust ... it's good currency for organisations, and they can spend it on things like encouraging people to get vaccinated or use less water.
"Communities get jack of political pointscoring around a lot of things. Being forced to be transparent is not a good look.
"Having a policy that's based on, 'We don't publish things as a general rule,' is just the wrong policy setting."
She said governments often were motivated by fear of the media's "tendency to go after the position of conflict".
"People would say the media has a role in this. Politicians feel they battle the media, and public servants are told not to talk to the media."
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