Our reference: FOI 24/25-2113 (LEXD 696)
9 July 2025
Accessibility Anonymous By email: foi+request-13233-1f482635@righttoknow.or.au
Dear Accessibility Anonymous
Freedom of Information request — Request consultation process
Thank you for your correspondence of 28 May 2025, in which you requested access under the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (FOI Act) to documents held by the National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA).
Scope of your request
You have requested access to the following documents:
- All training materials for internal or external legal teams and/or case manager which address topics related to disability awareness, accessibility, discrimination, or reasonable adjustments.
- Ethical standards expected of external legal representatives and barristers (whether engaged directly or by external solicitors).
- All documents relating to NDI policy and posture on adjustments requested by participants for any stage of ART proceedings (whether self-represented or legally represented).
- Any unpublished advice or feedback from the Independent Expert Review trial regarding participant accessibility needs and reasonable adjustments.
- Any related directives from the Board, CEO or Deputy CEO.
- Any standard operating procedures, checklists, or other process guidance for ensuring these obligations are met and appropriately documented.
- Any documentation relating to accountability and reporting mechanisms.
- Any briefings prepared for the CEO, Board, or Minister which reference the NDIA’s compliance with the ART’s accessibility objective.
- Any documents relating to the NDIA’s preparation to comply with the expanded accessibility requirement upon commencement of the ART.
- Any guidance documents relating to adjustments potentially required for participants with different disabilities to participate effectively in proceedings.
Please include any documents which have not yet been updated to reflect the transition from the AAT to the ART, and any documents still in draft form.
Practical refusal
I am authorised to make decisions under section 23(1) of the FOI Act.
I am writing to advise that the work involved in processing your request in its current form would substantially and unreasonably divert the resources of the NDIA from its other operations due to its broad scope. This is called a ‘practical refusal reason’ under section 24AA of the FOI Act.
On this basis, I intend to refuse your request. However, before I make a final decision, I am writing to provide you with an opportunity to revise your request. This is called a ‘request consultation process’ as set out under section 24AB of the FOI Act. You have 14 days to respond to this notice in one of the ways set out below.
Why I intend to refuse your request
On 29 May 2025, you responded to an email sent by my colleague Mackenzie by asking the FOI officer to whom your request was allocated to reach out to you to address any clarifications or refinements of your request.
On 10 June 2025, after your request was allocated to me, I emailed you asking you to provide me with your contact phone number so we could discuss your request.
I also advised you that, in response to preliminary enquiries made of the Agency’s Legal Operations team, the FOI team had been advised that identifying and locating documents falling within the scope of your request would involve working with multiple stakeholders in numerous Agency business areas, including the Minister’s office, the Agency’s CEO, the NDIS Board, external law firms, case managers, internal Agency lawyers, support teams and reporting teams. I also noted that, as there is no timeframe around your request, processing it would involve searching many different business systems that have been used over the past 12 years, as well as Agency archives.
I do not appear to have received a response to my email of 10 June.
Given the breadth of your request, I consider it likely there would be hundreds of pages worth of material that falls within the scope of your request as currently worded. Each of these pages would then require review and collation by an FOI officer. The documents that are assessed as being within scope of the request will then need to be reviewed for any sensitivities and possible exemption under the FOI Act and scheduled, we will need to consider any consultations and carry these out if required, a decision will need to be made on each document, and a decision letter prepared. This will significantly increase the hours that it will take an FOI officer to process your request.
The work carried out by the FOI team would be in addition to the work carried out by the Legal Operations team and other areas of the Agency simply to identify and retrieve the documents.
As a result, I am of the view that the work involved in the processing of this request would substantially and unreasonably divert the resources of the NDIA from its other operations.
Request consultation process
You now have an opportunity to revise your request to enable it to proceed.
Revising your request can mean narrowing the scope of the request to make it more manageable or explaining in more detail the documents you wish to access. For example, by providing more specific information about exactly what documents you are interested in, the NDIA will be able to pinpoint the documents more quickly and avoid using excessive resources to process documents you are not interested in.
To reduce the scope of your request, you might like to consider:
- Confining your request to access to documents created between 27 May 2024 and 28 May 2025
- Excluding any obsolete documents from your request
- Clarifying that Point 2 of your request is for access to documents created by the Agency that set out the ethical standards expected of external legal representatives and counsel
- Clarifying that Point 5 of your request is for access to directives from the Board, the Agency’s CEO or DCEO related to advice or feedback from the Independent Expert Review trial regarding participant accessibility needs and reasonable adjustments in the context of proceedings before the Administrative Reviews Tribunal
- Clarifying Point 7 of your request. To whom do the accountability mechanisms apply? To whom is the reporting made?
You have 14 days from the date you receive this letter to contact me and do one of the following:
a. withdraw your request b. make a revised request c. indicate that you do not wish to revise the request.
During this period, you are welcome to seek assistance to revise your request. If you revise your request in a way that adequately addresses the practical refusal reason outlined above, we will recommence processing it.
Please note that the time taken to consult with you regarding the scope of your request is not taken into account for the purposes of the timeframe for processing your request.
You can contact me by email at foi@ndis.gov.au.
Alternatively, you can reply in writing to the following address:
Freedom of Information Section Information Release, Privacy and Legal Operations Branch Reviews and Information Release Division National Disability Insurance Agency GPO Box 700 CANBERRA ACT 2601
If you do not contact me within this period, that is by 24 July 2025, I will issue you a formal decision letter than confirms my reasons for refusing your request.
Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions.
Yours sincerely
Helen [HIL533] Assistant Director, Freedom of Information Information Release, Privacy and Legal Operations Branch Reviews and Information Release Division