It’s not just thirsty office workers who look forward to the end of the working week. Friday afternoon has become the time du jour for government departments to publish potentially damaging documents under Freedom of Information laws in the hope that an unsuspecting media may not give them the scrutiny they would otherwise receive.

Last week, Treasury played this tactic of media management to a tee by publishing a string of documents online which revealed the potential impacts of a carbon price. The documents were published after a number of media outlets applied for their release under FOI laws.

For any media outlet it should have been a big story, but the fact the documents were available free online to all outlets meant they lacked one vital ingredient — exclusivity. Coverage the next day reflected this and scrutiny of the carbon price modeling was relatively muted.

Channel Seven FOI editor Michael McKinnon says the philosophy of disclosure trumpeted by the federal government in its reform to the FOI Act is being undermined by departmental document dumps. He doesn’t necessarily have a problem with the carbon price dump — there were multiple FOI applicants — but he does have a problem when there is only one applicant and documents are made public.

“There is clearly a public interest in journalists doing FOI,” he told Crikey. “Journalists are motivated to get exclusive stories. That’s what we do.”

Last year, the federal government announced reforms to Australia’s FOI laws. Australia’s Right to Know, a coalition of 12 major media companies, lauded the changes which included a revision of fees, fewer exemptions and a public interest test weighted in favour of disclosure. A new Office of the Information Commissioner was also officially opened in Canberra to police the law.

McKinnon argues for a three-day grace period in the release of FOI documents to the public. He says journalists are motivated by exclusive stories and document dumps will deter them from putting in FOI requests.

Sean Parnell, FOI editor at The Australian, agrees. He says there is a theory among some bureaucrats that, by releasing document under FOI to everyone, media outlets will be less inclined to submit subsequent FOI applications.

“This is one of the unintended and perverse consequences of the new laws, and specifically the government’s failure to legislate a minimum grace period for applicants to publish their documents,” he told Crikey. “Rather than encourage agencies to freely and proactively release documents, the new FOI regime is allowing Treasury, and anyone else with the ‘same day public release’ policy, to control the timing and impact of publication resulting from FOI.”

Another consequence of releasing documents to all media outlets is that it becomes a race to publish first, says McKinnon. That’s a problem when FOI stories are often related to complex and dense material.

“They require context, they require explanation and story presentation is helped by interviews,” he said. “If documents are dumped then we have got to put them to air, which is what happened last week.”

Defence is one of the better departments to deal with in relation to FOI because they “give journalists some time”, says McKinnon, while Treasury is one of the hardest. He says at least three of his FOI requests have been handed over to other outlets, while Parnell says one of his recent FOI applications was also the victim of Treasury’s same day public release policy.

“This is not transparency, nor is it the government allowing for an informed debate,” said Parnell. “It is simply another form of media manipulation, in the same way annual reports all seem to be released at once and contentious decisions are only communicated on a big news day.”

McKinnon says if dumps are not fixed soon, that could open up the door for further parliamentary reform.

“We’ve got a new FOI Act, we’re supposed to have this new FOI culture and now bureaucrats are doing their best to kill it,” he said. “Senator John Faulkner, if he was still there, I think would stop this, but no one in the government seems to give one.”

The Right to Know coalition is understood to have recently made a submission on the issue of document dumps to the Office of the Information Commissioner, with a ruling expected soon.