FOI and Public Documents: Avoiding Mistakes

A lunchtime webinar session

When it comes to FOI and public documents, our experience has been that accessibility is not what you think.

There is a common misconception that the FOI Act does not apply to publicly available documents.  Like most legal concepts, whether or not the FOI Act applies to public documents depends on a number of factors.  So, it is wrong to say that publicly available documents aren’t covered by FOI.  In fact, you may be surprised at how often FOI captures public documents.  But how do you work that out?

There may also be many documents which are not available under FOI because of provisions expressly stating that if they contain certain public information, they can be excluded.  We will help inform you and clear the confusion.

Topics covered:

We will look at the following topics:

• when publicly available documents are excluded from FOI?
• when public documents are still covered by FOI?
• what is the legally correct position?
• regardless of the legal position, what practical steps can agencies take?

This is one of the last sessions available to help spend your agency training budget before the end of the financial year.  Book now and keep your knowledge up to date.

The webinar will be conducted using WebEx (end to end encryption).  For information about how this will work, click here for FAQs.