The Freedom of Information Index - a world first

 
PHD student Johan Lidbreg

A new tool for measuring information access and democracy is under development at Murdoch University - the Freedom of Information Index.

PhD student Johan Lidberg is putting the finishing touches on his comparative investigation of Freedom of Information laws around the world, which has provided new insight into how freely the citizens of democratic nations can access public information.

'There are more than 55 countries who have freedom of information laws in place, which is one of the marks of a democratic nation,' Lidberg said.

'However, there are significant differences in how accessible information is made within the different systems and some countries seem to have passed token legislation that was never really intended to work in practice.'

Originally a journalist from Sweden, Lidberg was astounded at how hard it was to gain standard public information whilst working in Australia.

'I put in a request for some information about political boundaries during an election period and it took six months to retrieve the information - long after my need for it had passed,' he said.

'It inspired me to look deeper into a comparison between Sweden and Western Australia and their attitudes and working practices towards Freedom of Information, which formed the work for my Masters thesis at Murdoch University.'

For his PhD studies, Lidberg continued to build on his work in the field by incorporating an examination of systems in South Africa, the United States and Thailand.

The project had three main aspects - Freedom of Information requests by in-country journalists to demonstrate the working practice of the legislation, a survey of top civil servants and politicians to assess attitudes toward the system and the development of a comparative template to assess the effectiveness and quality of the legislation.

This template is the first of its kind in the world, and together with other sub-studies form the base for an evaluation tool for the quality of Freedom of Information laws. To provide an overview, the data will be collapsed into an index that will give each country of study a rank describing how well the respective FOI regimes work in practice.

'This template could be an assistive tool to measure how serious each country is about transparency and independent access to government held information. This in turn could also serve as an indicator of democracy in the countries of study,' Lidberg said.

'It provides insight into the freedom and accessibility of the media in countries that have these sorts of laws.'

Lidberg hopes to finish his PhD early next year, and is interested in investigating how this template could be applied to assess transparency in the corporate sector.