The Albanese Government’s election promise of a plan to have a critical minerals strategic reserve remains a secret. What’s the scam?
The scam is that our desire to see what the plan would entail is being met with the usual secrecy.
Successive Australian governments have had the (lack of) vision that we ought to be the world’s biggest and best quarry. Dig it up and export it. Don’t value-add here, and in some cases, just give it away.
So when Albanese announced during the election campaign a plan to have a critical mineral strategic reserve, MWM thought it might be worth checking to make sure the Government has learned from past mistakes, so we put in an FOI looking for recently authored critical mineral policy documents.
There were nine documents in the inventory, but we were only granted very partial access to three documents and fully refused access to six documents.
FOI Refusal Decision
Who would have thought we had secret rocks?
We have appealed the decision, so stay tuned, as getting information under FOI can be like getting blood from a stone…
Vision 2024: aim to “make Australia a better quarry” … and a CO2 dump
Rex Patrick is a former Senator for South Australia and, earlier, a submariner in the armed forces. Best known as an anti-corruption and transparency crusader, Rex is also known as the "Transparency Warrior."