Ms SPENDER (Wentworth) (14:44):

My question is for the Prime Minister. The royal commission into robodebt found that cabinet secrecy enabled the appalling abuse of power to continue for years, yet your government's FOI bill would expand, not reduce, that secrecy. The crossbench and the Greens will not support it. Is the government really going to work with the parties responsible for robodebt, to explicitly act against the royal commission's findings and increase secrecy in government?

Mr ALBANESE (Grayndler—Prime Minister) (14:44): With respect to the member for Wentworth, the robodebt royal commission did not find that cabinet processes were the problem. They found that ministers acted directly in contravention of the advice that they were given, and knowing—even though questions were being asked in this chamber. So let's not let those responsible for robodebt off the hook by suggesting, bizarrely, that somehow reform of a system that is broken, the FOI system, has something to do with support for robodebt. That is a link which is simply not there, I say to the member for Wentworth.

The fact is that the FOI system currently is not working for anyone. FOI is a vital feature of democracy, but right now the system is broken. The current framework was established in the 1980s, and one of the things that have occurred is that some of those crossbenchers—I don't know if the member for Wentworth is one of them—participated in a business model where a failed former senator set up a model where they're actually paid to put in FOI requests, thereby costing taxpayers money twice the way through. The other thing that is happening is that more than a million hours of time was spent in the last year—

The SPEAKER: Order. The Prime Minister will pause.

Mr Small interjecting—

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Forrest, the member for Wentworth is entitled to raise a point of order. We don't need to have any interjections. The member for Wentworth on a point of order?

Ms Spender: The point of order is on relevance. This is related to cabinet secrecy and explicitly the robodebt findings in relation to FOI in cabinets and how that was linked together.

The SPEAKER: The Prime Minister has dealt with issue in terms of pretty explicitly—

Mr Albanese interjecting—

The SPEAKER: The Prime Minister has the call. So he is being absolutely directly relevant in terms of that point of order.

Mr ALBANESE: To be very explicit, anyone who wants to be in a party of government and a part of government would say that cabinet processes do need to be confidential. That's the law, and it always has been the law. The idea that that is somehow an impediment is, quite frankly, a very long bow, and the member for Wentworth, I'm sure, knows that.

The fact is that, when the FOI Act commenced, the number of electronic records created by government and the speed at which they were created was unimaginable then. You can have artificial intelligence that can produce a thousand FOI requests in a matter of minutes. The idea that government will be stopped from functioning and that we will pretend that technological advances have not changed the dynamic—just as those members on the crossbench are the same people who say to me as Prime Minister, 'We need extra staff because of emails, because of technological advancement, because it's easier to contact members of parliament,' et cetera. What I do say to the member opposite and to all members of this House is engage constructively in this reform because this reform is necessary if government is going to be able to function in the future. (Time expired)