The federal government is ignoring cost-effective ways of dealing with a massive Freedom of Information (FOI) backlog because it refuses to engage with smaller, local providers, according to frustrated industry players.
While the Attorney-General's Department pushed for legislative reforms to curb and manage voluminous FOI requests, Canberra firms Nuvento and Jones-Hope Legal said the real bottlenecks to manage the backlog were systemic barriers to adopting local innovation over global giants. Their joint venture platform, Comply FOI, was designed to cut down on the time taken to process FOI requests by up to 95 per cent.
In 2024-25, the number of FOI requests and estimated costs of processing those requests reached decade highs of 43,000 and $98 million respectively. The Albanese government said the current system was 'broken' as it was not able to deal with new technologies and spam AI-generated requests in 2025.
Nuvento chief executive David Hohnke said the solution was technological and not legislative, as Comply FOI reached decisions for requests within minutes. However, the founders said they had hit a brick wall of risk aversion from decision-makers. Nuvento chief technology officer David Sheard said there was a misplaced view within the current procurement system that smaller technology firms were riskier compared to large multinationals.
Ramsey Beydoun, acting deputy chief executive for strategy, planning and performance division for the Digital Transformation Agency, said agencies are responsible for managing their own procurement processes. In late 2025, the federal government increased the direct procurement threshold to $125,000 and mandated that agencies prioritise Australian SMEs for these smaller contracts.
Philip Jones-Hope, a principal partner at Jones-Hope Legal and Advisory, said when agencies attempted to innovate, they often settled for solutions that retrofitted generic generative AI models from larger firms, creating a 'Frankenstein' solution. GovTech founder Sam Maher said the rules were fundamentally built around known, existing products rather than new, end-to-end solutions.
