Neeson v The Chief Executive Officer of Centrelink

REASONS FOR JUDGMENT 1 This is an appeal under s 44 of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal Act 1975 (Cth) ("the AAT Act") from a decision of the Administrative Appeals Tribunal made on 15 March 2005. That decision disposed of an application made on 8 April 2004 by the applicant under s 55 of the Freedom of Information Act 1982 (Cth) ("the FOI Act") for a review of a decision made within an agency concerned in the administration of social welfare payments, Centrelink. 2 The applicant was in receipt of social welfare payments when he was injured at work in May 2001. It would seem that, by some time in early 2002, the relevant workers' compensation insurer agreed to commence making payments of compensation to the applicant with respect to this injury. Receipt of such payments would have affected the applicant's entitlement to continue to receive payments from Centrelink. However, the applicant alleges, and it is not denied, Centrelink anticipated the receipt of compensation payments and reduced the applicant's social welfare payments before the making of compensation payments by the insurer commenced. This led to a series of communications between the applicant and Centrelink, and to a series of entries on the applicant's file at Centrelink, in March 2002 and thereafter. It was these records that became relevant to the applicant's application under the FOI Act. 3 The applicant made the following applications to Centrelink: (a) On 18 September 2003, he applied for a change to a document about himself, which he claimed was incomplete, misleading and "not there". This was a request by the applicant that Centrelink "create notes" for three phone calls made on 1, 18 and 19 March 2002. (b) On 22 September 2003, he again complained that certain documents were incorrect and "not there", namely, a note of a fax sent on 10 April 2003 and a note of a phone call made on 20 November 2002. (c) On 17 December 2003, he requested the insertion of a new annotation upon an electronic contact note made by a Centrelink officer on 19 March 2002. In his words, the applicant requested "an addition immediately after the 19th March Note BEFORE the Annotates", and thereafter set out the terms of the insertion which he proposed. (d) On 17 December 2003, he requested the insertion of an additional annotation to an existing annotation, made on 5 April 2002, to the electronic contact note of 19 March 2002 previously referred to. He requested this because, he said, the existing annotation was false. 4 It appears that Centrelink did not deal with the applicant's applications of September 2003 in a timely way and, by correspondence dated 23 December 2003 (six days after the third and fourth applications referred to above), the Freedom of Information Officer in the Centrelink Area Office, North-Central ("the FOI Officer") apologised for the delays which the applicant had experienced, and said that she was endeavouring to finalise the applicant's request as soon as possible. She said that an unusually high number of requests, staff absences and the complexity of the applicant's request would make it difficult to finalise the matter before the end of January 2004. 5 The FOI Officer wrote to the applicant again on 17 March 2004. Her letter contained the following passage: "You requested that some of your version of events be inserted between some of Tefta's annotations, however the computer system does not allow me to annotate anywhere except for at the end of a document or its other annotations. In addition, the document you wished me to annotate/alter had dropped out of your current document display due to space shortages into the "historical document display" which cannot be annotated or altered. Because of this I have added an extra document to your current document record with a note to alert staff that it is to be read in conjunction with the original document of 19/3/02 and its annotations. This is the best I can do given the computer system limitations as described above."