Missing, presumed archived: when FOI releases disappear

Government agencies have quietly removed thousands of entries from their FOI disclosure logs, including some of considerable public interest. Why do records of information already released to the public disappear from view?

Freedom of information has brought some fascinating and consequential documents into public view. A very short list of highlights includes internal reports on Robodebt, AFP material concerning investigations of journalists, Defence’s investigations into detainee mistreatment, the search for MH370, the government’s response to WikiLeaks, Comcare’s inspections of offshore detention centres, and an OAIC privacy complaint about Cambridge Analytica.

Rather astonishingly, none of these appear on the agencies’ current FOI disclosure logs.

The problem

When I started building an archive of FOI releases, one of the biggest surprises was just how much was missing. As at November 7 2026, the site has 30,839 disclosure log entries. 5,794 of these no longer appear on any current log, but I was able to track them down thanks to the Wayback Machine and the Australian Web Archive. This includes 97% of all entries for IP Australia, 80% for the Department of Finance, 72% for Services Australia, 64% for the Department of Defence, and 47% for the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing.

Finding these missing entries required me to reconstruct the histories of agencies through over a decade of machinery of government changes, locate the URLs of earlier disclosure logs, and then find archived captures of each. This is obviously unreasonable, and I did it only because I’m not an entirely reasonable person.

Making matters worse, many agencies that remove disclosure log entries don’t say so. Of the five agencies mentioned above, only two state that they remove information after a specific period (either one or two years).

Disclosure logs are intended to help people access government information that’s already been released. In theory, disclosure logs should prevent people from having to request documents that have already been released. For instance, if you were considering requesting documents about AI bots from the Attorney-General’s Department, you may find that one of the six sets of already released documents already has what you need. That saves time processing material that’s already been located, assessed, and released.

But that all depends on the releases remaining on the log.

Where do disclosure log entries go?

Some agencies remove disclosure log entries quite deliberately. The Department of Finance, for example, meticulously removes entries from its disclosure log once they reach two years old. Bizarrely, Finance continues to host the pages and documents but just stops linking to them from its disclosure log. For instance, FOI 23-24/087, which concerns communications about the Robodebt Royal Commission, was published on 21 March 2024 but has since disappeared from the log. Yet the original subpage for that release, complete with details of the request and links to the released documents, is still there. The information and documents are still available, just not in the one place people would reasonably look for them.

Sometimes the pruning is rather more selective. The disclosure log of the Australian Federal Police has entries going back to 2015, but has a conspicuous one-year gap covering most of 2019. An archived version of the log shows dozens of entries from this period that apparently didn’t survive the migration to the new log. Many of these concern the June 2019 AFP raids on journalist Annika Smethurst and the ABC. These entries might reasonably be considered to have enduring public value. The gap is not acknowledged on the disclosure log.

Disconcertingly, a handful of entries across multiple agencies have disappeared from disclosure logs within days or weeks of being published. FOI Forest captured them before they vanished, but the web archives didn’t. In those cases, FOI Forest appears to be the only remaining record of the entries. Given that I’m one person running the site in my free time, this doesn’t seem particularly robust.

Then there are the entries that remain on disclosure logs, but no longer lead anywhere. The disclosure log of the Australian Public Service Commission currently links to Right to Know for 58 entries. Right to Know is a website run by the charity OpenAustralia Foundation that allows people to make FOI requests publicly, with the correspondence and released documents available for others to read. Sixteen of those APSC requests have since been removed from Right to Know. The OpenAustralia Foundation has recently warned it’s running out of money and may need to wind down services within months. There’s nothing in the FOI Act preventing agencies from linking to documents hosted elsewhere, but a disclosure log full of dead links is pushing it.

Surprisingly, machinery of government changes don’t seem to be a major cause of disappearing entries. For instance, the increasingly expansively named Department of Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development, Communications, Sport and the Arts has diligently assembled logs from its many predecessors. That said, it’s not always pretty. Entries can end up duplicated or shunted to obscure corners of a disclosure log (hello, Department of Communications and the Arts!).

What about archives?

The Wayback Machine and the Australian Web Archive are incredible resources. They’ve allowed me to track down thousands of disclosure log entries and documents that would otherwise be almost impossible to find. However, they’re no substitute for agencies maintaining complete disclosure logs.

The problem is that disclosure logs are rarely a single page. Most link to documents, and many are paginated or have separate pages for individual entries. Preserving a complete log therefore requires archiving every page, every entry page, and every linked document. In practice, this rarely happens.

The OAIC’s own disclosure log illustrates the problem. Its current log goes back only to 2023, with earlier entries relegated to the Australian Web Archive. The first page of the OAIC’s current disclosure log has been captured 65 times by the Wayback Machine. The second page has been captured only four times. Coverage gets progressively worse, and the log has at least ten pages.

This means you can’t simply open an archived snapshot and browse the disclosure log as it existed at that point in time. Instead, you have to work through successive captures of the first page, looking for entries that appeared before they were pushed onto later pages. This is a vastly more tedious experience than viewing an agency’s current disclosure log. If there was a long gap between captures, some entries may never have been archived at all. And even when an entry survives, the documents it linked to might not.

I’ve been able to recover 5,794 disclosure entries by working through archived captures agency by agency and page by page. This is an extraordinary amount of effort to partially recover information that agencies have already released.

How is this allowed?

The FOI Act doesn’t say anything about how long entries should be published for, just that they should be. Bewilderingly, it’s the OAIC’s FOI Guidelines that give agencies an explicit green light to remove information from the disclosure log. Version 1.7 of the guidelines says: “it may be appropriate that information or documents are removed after a certain period of time, for example 2 years, unless the information has enduring public value.”

If I’m being generous, I’ll concede that there may once have been practical reasons to remove older disclosure log entries to keep websites usable. In 2026, that justification doesn’t seem particularly credible. And of course, some of the information being removed clearly has enduring public value.

The Department of Home Affairs also significantly undercuts any argument that disclosure log pruning is necessary due to volume. Home Affairs has the largest number of entries of any agency, making up 19% of the total entries on FOI Forest. The agency with the next highest number of entries makes up just 5% of the total. Despite this, Home Affairs manages to retain entries dating back to 2011.

Services Australia teaches us that we can’t necessarily rely on agencies to preserve entries of public value (or even to have a disclosure log at all). Its current log goes back only to October 2024, meaning many entries concerning Robodebt have disappeared. By my count, at least 17 entries related to Robodebt have been published by Services Australia or its predecessor, the Department of Human Services. Today, only four are still on the disclosure log.

Services Australia currently has just 170 entries on its disclosure log. The agency says it “remove[s] information in our disclosure log after 12 months unless the information has enduring public value.”

If Robodebt documents don’t have enduring public value, what does?

But more to the point, why should the record of what government has released have an expiry date at all?