As Australia has become more corrupt it has also become far less transparent — the number of successful FOI requests has dropped alarmingly.
This is part two of The Dirty Country: corruption in Australia. Read part one here, and the whole series here.
Australia is becoming a more secret place with greater restrictions on public access to information — allowing greater freedom for soft and hard corruption to flourish in politics and the bureaucracy.
Since 2017 Australia has slipped out of the top 20 countries in the world press freedom index and managed just 26th spot in 2020, behind a number of developing countries such as Jamaica and Namibia.
