Freedom of Information in Western Australia: How to Request Government Records

Western Australia's Freedom of Information Act 1992 gives the public a right to be given access to agency documents within 45 days, and if a request is refused the review path runs through the Information Commissioner to the Supreme Court on a question of law only, not the State Administrative Tribunal.

Who decides, and under which Act

Western Australia's freedom of information regime runs on the Freedom of Information Act 1992, most recently updated by the Information Commissioner Act 2024 and the Privacy and Responsible Information Sharing Act 2024. Section 10(1) gives a person a right to be given access to the documents of an agency, other than an exempt agency, subject to and in accordance with the Act. The decision on any individual application is made by the agency that holds the document, under section 11(1), not by the Information Commissioner. A closed list in Schedule 2 removes some bodies from the Act's reach entirely, including the Governor's establishment, both Houses of Parliament and their committees, the Auditor General, the Corruption and Crime Commission, the Director of Public Prosecutions, the Information Commissioner's own office, and the Parliamentary Commissioner for Administrative Investigations, which is Western Australia's Ombudsman.

Courts sit in an unusual middle position. A court is an agency for the purposes of the Act, but a document only counts as a document of the court if it relates to matters of an administrative nature, so a judge's own reasoning and case files fall outside the Act's reach even though the registry that holds them is nominally covered. For the file itself, Court Records in Australia and its Western Australia page cover the court's own access process instead.

Before you apply: informal release

The Act does not itself name a formal informal-release pathway the way some other states do. What it does is carve some material out of the formal scheme altogether under section 6, where a document is already available for sale, free distribution, public inspection under another law, or through a library, museum or archive. Beyond that carve-out, the Office of the Information Commissioner's own public guidance actively encourages contacting the agency first, noting that some agencies have policies allowing them to routinely release particular kinds of documents without a formal application. This is agency discretion rather than a statutory right, so a reader who wants a guaranteed outcome still has the formal application to fall back on.

Making a valid application

Section 12(1) sets the checklist an application has to meet: it must be in writing, give enough information to identify the documents sought, give an Australian address for notices, include any other information the regulations require, and be lodged at an agency office along with any application fee. An applicant can ask for a particular access format, and can lodge by hand, post or fax, with postal lodgement deemed received on the fifth day after posting. If an application does not meet the checklist, section 11 requires the agency to take reasonable steps to help the applicant fix it rather than simply rejecting it.

Western Australia's own guidance was not specific, in the text checked for this page, about whether a personal-information application requires photo identification or another form of identity verification. Treat any such requirement as a matter to confirm directly with the agency handling a specific request rather than a fixed rule.

Fees and processing charges

An application for non-personal information costs $30, set by the Freedom of Information Regulations 1993, Schedule 1. An application seeking only the applicant's own personal information carries no application fee and no processing charges at all. Beyond the application fee, processing charges run at $30 an hour, or a proportionate part of an hour, for staff time dealing with the application, the same $30 an hour for supervised access time, $30 an hour for photocopying staff time plus $0.20 a copy, and $30 an hour for transcribing from a tape or other recording, along with the actual cost of duplicating other media or of delivery and postage. The Information Commissioner's own findings, referenced in the Office's guidance, confirm agencies cannot charge for locating documents that are within scope, only for dealing with the application once found.

An applicant who is impecunious in the agency's opinion, or who holds a valid Commonwealth pensioner concession card or another prescribed card, gets processing charges reduced by 25 percent under regulation 3. If an agency estimates charges might exceed $25, section 17(3) requires it to notify the applicant of that estimate, and the applicant then has 30 days to confirm they want to proceed. Where charges are payable, an advance deposit of 25 percent of the estimated amount above the application fee applies. Internal review is free under section 44, and external review by the Information Commissioner is also free; the external-review provisions contain no fee provision, and the Office of the Information Commissioner confirms this in its own guidance. These figures were read from the Regulations as they currently stand, current as of a 19 March 2026 amending instrument, though it was not separately confirmed whether that amendment touched the fee figures themselves.

How long a decision takes

Section 13(3) sets the permitted period at 45 days after an agency receives the application, unless the agency and applicant agree otherwise or the Information Commissioner allows a different period. If the agency does not give notice within that window, section 13(2) treats it as having refused access at the end of the period, with the applicant taken to have received a refusal notice on that day. The Information Commissioner can extend an agency's time where satisfied the agency tried to meet the 45 days but it was impracticable, and can also shorten the agency's time on the applicant's own request; any extension has to be notified in writing within the original 45 days.

An amendment application, covered below, runs on a shorter 30-day clock rather than the 45 days that applies to access requests.

What is exempt

Exemptions sit in Schedule 1 to the Act, covering areas including Cabinet and Executive Council deliberations, inter-governmental relations, personal information, trade secrets and commercial or business information, law enforcement and public safety, deliberative processes of government, legal professional privilege, confidential communications, the state's economy and financial affairs, contempt of Parliament or a court, adoption and artificial-conception information, and information already protected by secrecy provisions in other Western Australia Acts. Some of these clauses, including the personal-information exemption and part of the commercial-information exemption, carry their own public-interest override, so a document is not withheld under those clauses if disclosure would, on balance, be in the public interest. Section 102(1) places the onus of justifying a refusal on the agency, not the applicant.

If you're refused: the review ladder

An applicant unhappy with an agency's decision can seek internal review first, under section 39 for access decisions or section 54 for amendment decisions, lodged within 30 days and free of charge, decided by an officer who was not the original decision maker and who has 15 days to respond or is deemed to have confirmed the original decision. Internal review is not available where the original decision was made by the agency's principal officer or a Minister, in which case the applicant goes straight to external review.

External review is a complaint made to the Information Commissioner, also free, lodged within 60 days for an access or amendment applicant or 30 days for a third party. The Commissioner tries to resolve the complaint informally and by conciliation, and if that fails issues a formal decision confirming, varying or setting aside the agency's decision. The Office of the Information Commissioner has publicly acknowledged a significant backlog of external review matters and runs a queue-management policy to prioritise some complaints ahead of others, worth keeping in mind on likely timing.

Beyond the Commissioner, an appeal goes to the Supreme Court, and only on a question of law, under section 85. There is no role for the State Administrative Tribunal anywhere in this ladder. Even on appeal, the Supreme Court cannot itself order that access be given to a document once it is established to be exempt; its power is to affirm, reverse or send the matter back to the Commissioner. The Commissioner can also refer a question of law to the Supreme Court mid-complaint under section 78.

Correcting your own records

Part 3 of the Act gives a person a right to apply for amendment of their own personal information held by an agency, if it is inaccurate, incomplete, out of date or misleading, and extends that right to the nearest relative of someone who has died. The application has to be in writing, identify the document, state the believed inaccuracy, and specify how the applicant wants it fixed. An agency can alter, delete, insert information, or add an explanatory note, but cannot destroy the original information unless the Information Commissioner certifies that keeping it is impracticable or that the prejudice to the person outweighs the public interest in a complete record. If an agency refuses to amend, the applicant can instead ask for a notation recording the disputed accuracy, which the agency must add unless it is defamatory or unreasonably long. There is no fee for an amendment application, a notation request, or the internal review of an amendment refusal, and the agency has 30 days to decide rather than the 45 days that applies to an access request.

Proactive disclosure

Part 5 of the Act requires every agency, other than a Minister or an exempt agency, to publish an up-to-date information statement at least once every 12 months. It has to describe the agency's structure and functions, how those functions affect the public, how the public can take part, the kinds of documents the agency usually holds, including anything already available outside the formal process, and its own access and amendment procedures with a contact officer and lodgement address. Agencies also have to make their internal policy manuals available for inspection and purchase, and to give the Information Commissioner a copy of the published statement.

What this Act does not cover

The Act reaches only Western Australia's own state and local government agencies. It does not reach federal agencies, which sit under the Commonwealth's own Freedom of Information Act 1982, or another state's agencies. A court's judicial-function documents, as noted above, sit outside the Act's reach even though the court itself counts as an agency; see Court Records in Australia for the court's own process. A person's own medical file at a public hospital overlaps with the state's health-records framework rather than running purely through this Act; see Medical Records in Australia. A criminal history or police check runs through Western Australia Police's own process, covered at Background Checks in Australia, and a land title search runs through Landgate, covered at Property Records in Australia. For the wider national picture of how the nine Australian freedom of information regimes relate to each other, see Freedom of Information in Australia.