What you can expect from us
| How to make a request | |
| Release of your own information | |
| Fees and charges | |
| What you can expect from us |
We will acknowledge your request within 14 days after we have received your request. We will also give you an estimate of any charges that apply to your request. We are usually required to inform you of our decision within 30 days unless that time has been extended. If a document contains information about a third party, we will need to consult them and may need to extend the time to give you our decision by another 30 days.
If for any other reason we are likely to need more than 30 days to complete your request, we will contact you to arrange an extension of time for processing of your request in accordance with the requirements under the FOI Act.
ANSTO may also apply to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to apply for an extension of the processing time where exceptional circumstances would prevent us from processing your request in 30 days. You will be informed in writing if the processing time has been extended.
If we do not meet these 30 day time limits, you can apply to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner to review our decision on the basis that we are deemed to have refused your request.
What happens if you disagree with our decision?
When we have made a decision about your FOI request, we will send you a letter explaining our decision and your review and appeal rights. You can ask for the following decisions to be reviewed:
- If we refuse to give you access to all or part of a document or if we defer giving you access
- If we impose a charge
- If we refuse to change or annotate information about you that you claim is incomplete, incorrect, out of date or misleading
A third party who disagrees with our decision to give you documents that contain information about them can also ask for our decision to be reviewed.
Internal review
You can request in writing that we reconsider our decision through an internal review. An internal review will be conducted by another officer in our agency. We will advise you of our new decision within 30 days of receiving your request.
Information Commissioner review
You can ask the Australian Information Commissioner to review our original decision or our decision on internal review within 60 days of the date of decision (or 30 days after you are notified if you are an affected third party).
The Information Commissioner can affirm or vary the decision or substitute a new decision. The Information Commissioner may decide not to conduct a review in certain circumstances.
More information is available at the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner.
Complaints
If you are unhappy with the way we have handled your request, you can contact the Australian Information Commissioner, who may investigate our actions. The Commonwealth Ombudsman can also investigate complaints about our actions. However, the Commonwealth Ombudsman and the Information Commissioner will consult to avoid the same matter being investigated twice.