In 2023 to 2024, only 21 per cent of Commonwealth FOI requests were granted in full, the lowest proportion in five years, down from 47 per cent in 2019 to 2020. Refusals rose to 24 per cent. At the same time, the Skills and Workforce Ministerial Council, ten Jobs and Skills Councils backed by $442 million of Commonwealth funding, the National Skills Agreement and the 2025 Outcome Standards for Registered Training Organisations are reshaping qualifications, regulation and training delivery across Australia. The Australian VET sector is beginning to notice the gap between the scale of what is being decided and the visibility of how those decisions are being made. This article examines why transparency has become a VET quality issue, not just a political one, what the freedom of information framework actually entitles the public to, where the system is breaking down, and what better openness in VET policy would require from the institutions that govern it.
In the Australian vocational education and training sector, frustration is no longer confined to assessment quality, audit inconsistency, compliance capability or provider burden. A deeper unease is becoming more visible. It is the sense that too many important decisions about the future of skills, qualifications, regulation, funding, collaboration and system reform are being shaped behind closed doors, while the people expected to live with the outcomes are left with fragments, communiqués, delayed disclosures and incomplete explanations. As a result, the sector is asking harder questions, not only about policy itself, but about transparency, access to information and the quality of public decision-making.
This shift matters. It signals that the VET sector's concerns are no longer only operational. They are also democratic and institutional. Providers, advisers, leaders and policy observers are increasingly aware that when transparency weakens, confidence weakens with it. And when confidence weakens in a system already dealing with inconsistency, reform fatigue and uneven implementation, every new policy move is met with greater suspicion.
That is why the future of VET policy cannot be separated from the question of how open the system is prepared to be.
How the Australian FOI framework is meant to work, and what it actually promises
Freedom of information in Australia is not a discretion. It is a statutory right. The Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth) grants every Australian a legally enforceable right to obtain documents held by the Australian Government, subject only to defined statutory exemptions. The objects of the Act, set out in section 3, state that information held by government is to be managed for public purposes and is a national resource, and that access to it is to be facilitated and promoted promptly and at the lowest reasonable cost. Those words are not decorative. They are the statutory foundation on which every FOI decision, refusal, exemption and review is supposed to rest.
The mechanics of the Act are straightforward. Under section 15, an agency or minister must decide on an FOI request within 30 days of receipt. That period can be extended by 30 days by agreement with the applicant under section 15AA, by 30 days for third-party consultation under section 15(6), or by a longer period approved by the Information Commissioner for complex or voluminous requests under section 15AB. If access is refused, the applicant may seek internal review under Part VI, or proceed directly to an external Information Commissioner review (IC review) under Part VII. The Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, established under the Australian Information Commissioner Act 2010, conducts those reviews as an independent statutory agency in the Attorney-General's portfolio.
That is the architecture. It is deliberately structured so that the default position of government is openness, with exemptions the exception rather than the rule. The gap between that statutory design and the practical experience of FOI applicants is where the sector's current unease lives.
What the OAIC's own numbers show about access to government information
The data on how the FOI system is functioning in practice is not anecdotal. It is published by the regulator itself. The OAIC's statistics for 2023 to 2024 show that only 21 per cent of Commonwealth FOI requests were granted in full. That is the lowest proportion in five years. In 2019 to 2020, the equivalent figure was 47 per cent. The proportion of requests granted in part has grown from 38 per cent to 55 per cent across that period. Refusals have grown from 15 per cent to 24 per cent. Of the 34,706 FOI applications finalised in 2023 to 2024, 74 per cent were finalised within the statutory 30-day timeframe, flat on the previous year. Those are not marginal shifts. They describe a systemic change in how agencies are interpreting and applying their FOI obligations.
The backlog in external review is just as telling. In early 2024, the OAIC had 2,213 outstanding IC reviews on hand, some dating back to 2019. The Information Commissioner at the time confirmed that 67 matters had been pending for five years. The 2024 to 2025 financial year brought the first meaningful reduction in that backlog since 2014 to 2015, with the OAIC reducing IC reviews on hand by 16 per cent and finalising 41 per cent more matters than in the previous year, despite a 21 per cent increase in new matters. That is genuine progress, and it reflects both sustained work by OAIC staff and increased, if still modest, resourcing. But the oldest matter on hand at 30 June 2025 was still 56 months old. Even with the improvement, Australians asking the Commonwealth for documents they are legally entitled to see can wait years for a review of a refusal.
In July 2025, the Centre for Public Integrity published FOI: Secrecy and Delay, a detailed analysis of OAIC data from the 2021 to 2022, 2022 to 2023 and 2023 to 2024 annual reports. The report documented what it described as a long-term deterioration in processing times, a sluggish and congested review system, an understaffed OAIC, and what it characterised as arguably systemic misuse of statutory exemptions by government. That is a serious conclusion from a serious source, and it is now part of the public record on which any credible discussion of Australian transparency has to proceed.
This is not a partisan account. It is drawn from the regulator's own annual reports, published under statutory obligation. When the Australian Information Commissioner's published data shows that less than a quarter of FOI requests are now granted in full, the sector is entitled to ask what has changed in the culture of disclosure, and whether the statutory object of prompt, low-cost access is being honoured in practice.
The scale of the VET policy agenda is now being decided
What makes this particularly relevant to the VET sector is the sheer scale of what is currently being decided, and the number of bodies involved in deciding it.
The Skills and Workforce Ministerial Council, renamed from the Skills Ministers' Meeting in 2023 following a National Cabinet review of ministerial councils, provides the principal forum for national cooperation and stewardship across the VET system. It is chaired by the Commonwealth Minister for Skills and Training and includes portfolio ministers with responsibility for skills and training from every state and territory. The Council meets no less often than quarterly, reports to National Cabinet on priorities within the Federal Relations Architecture, and releases a communiqué after each meeting. The Department of Employment and Workplace Relations publishes those communiqués on its website. The most recent was released on 5 December 2025.
Sitting underneath and alongside that Council is a governance architecture of real substance. Ten Jobs and Skills Councils, backed by $442 million in Commonwealth funding and formally established between 2023 and 2024, lead workforce planning, training product development, and industry stewardship across their sectors, covering everything from care and support, to construction and property, to finance, technology and business, to transport and logistics. Jobs and Skills Australia, with its own Ministerial Advisory Board and 2024 to 2027 Strategic Plan, provides workforce analysis to underpin the Council's advice. The National Skills Agreement, endorsed by National Cabinet in 2023, structures five years of co-funded reform. The National Skills Plan operationalises that agreement across the Commonwealth, states and territories. The 2025 Outcome Standards for Registered Training Organisations, which took effect on 14 March 2025, reshape the regulatory compact for every registered provider in the country. The Qualification Reform Design Group continues to develop advice on the future shape of qualifications themselves.
That is a substantial body of decision-making. It affects qualification architecture, funding priorities, regulatory burden, workforce planning, apprenticeship pathways, tertiary integration, and the operating environment of roughly 4,000 registered training organisations and the students they enrol. The scale of the agenda is not the problem. The problem is the gap between the scale of what is being decided and the quality of public explanation about how those decisions are being reached.
Why communiqués are not an adequate explanatory record
Communiqués have their place. They are useful as a record of what ministers formally agreed. They preserve political accountability by making decisions visible. They allow the sector to orient itself around high-level direction. But they are not an adequate explanatory record on their own, and nobody drafting them pretends otherwise. Communiqués are by design smooth, consensus-facing documents that describe outcomes rather than the deliberations that produced them. They omit the disagreements, the options considered and rejected, the competing jurisdictional positions, the advice from officials, the data underpinning recommendations, and the trade-offs weighed. That is not a failure of the communiqué format. It is its nature.
The problem arises when the communiqué becomes the only widely available record of how a decision was made. In that situation, the sector is asked to absorb outcomes without a meaningful view of the reasoning. Providers, peak bodies, advisers and frontline staff are expected to align practice to reform signals that may be summarised in a few paragraphs. Training product reforms that will determine what is taught, who can teach it, and how learners will be assessed for the next decade are described publicly in language that is necessarily partial. That is not a conspiracy. It is simply what communiqués are. The question is whether, alongside them, the explanatory material that would allow real engagement is also being made available. Too often in VET, it is not.
That is why the pressure around freedom of information in the sector is growing. When the surface public record is limited, and the explanatory material sits in departmental files, briefs, advice, modelling and jurisdictional correspondence, the statutory FOI process becomes the mechanism by which the sector tries to understand what is actually being decided on its behalf. And when that mechanism produces refusals, redactions, extensions and multi-year reviews, the sense of exclusion deepens.
How opacity in policy creates real costs, not just political ones
Delayed or limited transparency in a national policy system is not cost-free, even when it is technically defensible. There are three concrete costs that the VET sector is now carrying.
The first is interpretive instability. When underlying documents are hard to access, the sector fills the gap with speculation, commentary, fragmented information and competing assumptions. Policy signals are read through LinkedIn posts, second-hand accounts, conference remarks, incomplete extracts and the visible effects of decisions that were never fully explained. That is an unhealthy way to run a $51 billion national training system. It privileges insiders, rewards rumour, and leaves many organisations trying to prepare for change without a stable understanding of what the change is actually meant to achieve. Small and regional providers, which rarely have direct access to policy conversations, carry the heaviest share of that instability.
The second is reduced policy legitimacy. Reform is easier to defend when stakeholders can see that decisions were informed, contested honestly and supported by an accessible rationale. Even unpopular changes can sometimes earn respect when the reasoning is visible and the evidence can be examined. But where the path to the decision remains obscure, even sensible reforms are greeted with distrust. The sector may assume the worst not because the reform itself is indefensible, but because the process around it felt closed. In this way, opacity can damage good policy as easily as it shields weak policy. The 2025 Standards for RTOs are a useful test case here. They are a significant regulatory rebuild, backed by years of review work, including the Braithwaite Review in 2018, the Joyce Review in 2019, and the Rapid Review of ASQA's Regulatory Practices and Processes in 2020. Much of the underlying reasoning is genuinely strong. But where providers encounter reform language without full access to the supporting material, the debate about whether the reforms are good shades quickly into debate about whether the process was fair.
The third is the unequal distribution of understanding. Policy that is understood only by those inside the consultative architecture, or by those with the resources to pursue FOI requests through to IC review and beyond, is policy that privileges insiders. Large national peak bodies, well-resourced providers, and specialist policy consultancies can navigate that environment. Smaller RTOs, regional providers, community-based organisations and individual practitioners generally cannot. If the explanatory record of national VET reform is de facto restricted to those with the resources to extract it, the system is not serving its full constituency. It is serving a subset of it, and creating an information asymmetry that ordinary reform communications cannot close.
Intergovernmental decision-making and the limits of smooth public language
The opacity problem becomes sharper still when intergovernmental processes are involved. VET in Australia has always required coordination across Commonwealth and state or territory systems. That coordination is inherently political. Jurisdictions bring different interests, pressures and priorities. State and territory ministers will argue. Commonwealth ministers will push back. Officials will negotiate. That is not a sign of dysfunction. It is how federal systems are supposed to work.
The issue is not that disagreement exists. The issue is that disagreement is often invisible in the public record. When major policy areas are shaped through forums where competing jurisdictional positions genuinely exist, the public interest in understanding the nature of those positions becomes stronger, not weaker. If stakeholders see only the final compromise language and not the tensions that produced it, they are denied a meaningful view of how the system is actually functioning. They see a carefully worded statement of shared ambition and are left to infer, from later implementation differences, that the ambition was not quite as shared as the communiqué suggested.
Smooth public language is not always the same as trustworthy public communication. A more mature approach to intergovernmental transparency would recognise that the existence of disagreement, the substance of competing positions, and the rationale for the compromise eventually reached are all things the public has a legitimate interest in understanding, subject to reasonable protections for genuinely confidential deliberation. That is not an attack on the intergovernmental process. It is a prerequisite for its ongoing legitimacy in a sector where the stakes are high and the reform appetite is large.
The cultural question: whether transparency is treated as a duty or a burden
Much of the day-to-day experience of transparency is shaped less by what the law requires and more by the culture of the institution responding. The Freedom of Information Act 1982 is the same Act whether an agency interprets it generously or defensively. What differs is the disposition of the decision-maker, the resourcing of the FOI team, the signals from senior leadership, and the level of political sensitivity attaching to the documents requested.
When requests for information about major policy discussions are framed primarily as burdens on administrative resources or as inconvenient repetitions, the sector notices. It notices because the request itself is often not about curiosity alone. It is about understanding the trajectory of a system that affects livelihoods, educational standards, organisational survival and public money. A response that emphasises workload without adequately recognising the public importance of the underlying material can deepen the sense that transparency is being treated as a nuisance rather than a duty.
That perception has consequences. When stakeholders begin to believe that access is reluctantly granted, slowly processed or structurally resisted, they become more sceptical about the integrity of the process itself. They begin wondering what is being protected, what disagreements are being hidden, what assumptions are not being openly defended, and why it is so hard to see the reasoning behind major decisions. Even where the reality is more bureaucratic than sinister, the effect is the same. Trust begins to erode. And erosion of trust is particularly serious in a sector where trust is already under strain.
What better transparency in VET policy would actually require
Better transparency in VET policy would not require dismantling the legitimate confidentiality protections that the FOI Act already builds into its structure. It would require four shifts, which together would substantially improve the sector's understanding of its own governance.
The first shift is richer routine disclosure. If communiqués are the principal public window into major policy discussions, they must be accompanied by richer explanatory material. Background papers, summaries of options considered, clearer rationale statements, and timely publication of supporting documentation, advice and modelling would all help reduce the pressure that later builds around FOI. This is not a radical proposal. It is a return to a more generous interpretation of the Information Publication Scheme that Part II of the FOI Act already contemplates.
The second shift is a more mature approach to intergovernmental transparency. Where disagreement exists, institutions must consider how much more can be said about the nature of the policy debate without compromising legitimate confidentiality. Smooth public language serves the short-term comfort of the institutions involved. Honest public language about the existence and substance of competing positions serves the long-term legitimacy of the reforms that eventually emerge. Those are different goods, and they must be weighed accordingly.
The third shift is timeliness. Delayed access is not neutral. In fast-moving policy environments, information that arrives far too late may satisfy formal statutory obligations while failing the practical purpose of transparency. A 56-month-old IC review is technically a review, but it is not a review that serves a live policy debate. Timeliness is a transparency issue, and it must be treated as such in resourcing decisions, workflow design, and political commitment. The Centre for Public Integrity's 2025 analysis is clear on this point: OAIC resourcing has improved meaningfully, but the volume of requests, the complexity of the material, and the caseload pressure still leave the system unable to guarantee timely external review. That is a structural problem that requires a structural response.
The fourth shift is cultural. Institutions that are serious about reform must be willing to explain complexity rather than hide behind simplification. The VET sector is full of experienced, thoughtful and technically capable people. It must be treated as an audience that can handle nuance, not one that must be protected from it. That means being prepared to publish the reasoning behind decisions, not only the decisions themselves, and to engage openly with the inevitable criticism that more visible reasoning invites. A system that cannot survive public scrutiny of its own reasoning is a system that is not yet ready to lead reform.
Transparency as institutional respect, not administrative burden
There is a broader democratic principle at stake here, and it deserves to be named directly. Transparency is not simply a communication style. It is a form of institutional respect. It signals that stakeholders are not expected merely to absorb outcomes, but are trusted to engage with the reasoning behind them. It recognises that those who teach, assess, manage, regulate, advise and govern within VET are capable of understanding complexity and deserve more than carefully managed fragments. A transparent system does not fear being examined. It expects examination because it understands that policies affecting the public must be able to survive scrutiny.
This principle is particularly important at a time when the VET sector is being asked to navigate reform while maintaining confidence in qualifications, assessment, workforce responsiveness and public accountability. If leaders want the sector to move with them, they must be prepared to show more of the path. Trust cannot be demanded from people who are repeatedly asked to implement changes without enough visibility into how those changes were shaped. Cooperation becomes more difficult when the process feels asymmetrical, with institutions holding the background knowledge and providers absorbing the frontline consequences.
The numbers in this article are not ornamental. 21 per cent of FOI requests granted in full, down from 47 per cent five years earlier. 24 per cent refused, up from 15 per cent. 2,213 outstanding IC reviews. A 56-month-old case is still on the books. Ten Jobs and Skills Councils, $442 million in funding, a National Skills Agreement and a 2025 regulatory rebuild, all being shaped alongside each other. These numbers describe a system in which the scale of what is being decided has grown faster than the transparency of how it is being decided. That is not sustainable.
The future of VET policy will depend on many things, including funding, workforce change, political will, regulatory design and institutional capability. But it will also depend on whether the sector believes that the system around it is willing to speak plainly enough about where it is going and why. Without that, every reform effort will carry an additional burden. Not just whether it is good policy, but whether people trust the process that produced it.
That is why the sector is asking harder questions now. Not because it has become cynical for the sake of it, but because the cost of not asking has become too high. In a system where decisions shape qualifications, provider stability, public trust and the future of skills, opacity is never a neutral background condition. It is itself a policy problem.
And unless that is recognised more clearly, transparency will remain one of the defining challenges of VET's future.
Primary legislative, regulatory and public policy sources referenced
Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth), sections 3, 11, 15, 15AA, 15(6), 15AB, Parts II, III, VI and VII, and sections 54F and 55K.
Australian Information Commissioner Act 2010 (Cth), section 8(h), establishing the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, Annual Report 2024-25, published 5 November 2025; Annual Report 2023-24; and published FOI statistics dashboard.
Centre for Public Integrity, Freedom of Information: Secrecy and Delay, July 2025.
Attorney-General (Cth) v Patrick [2024] FCAFC 126, on FOI decisions made on behalf of ministers.
National Vocational Education and Training Regulator (Outcome Standards for NVR Registered Training Organisations) Instrument 2025, effective 14 March 2025.
Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, Skills and Workforce Ministerial Council communiqués, most recently 5 December 2025.
Department of Employment and Workplace Relations, Jobs and Skills Councils network ($442 million Commonwealth program, 10 councils established between 2023 and 2024).
National Skills Agreement, endorsed by National Cabinet, 2023; National Skills Plan; Jobs and Skills Australia 2025-26 Work Plan and 2024-27 Strategic Plan.
