Section 25 - Deletion of exempt matter or irrelevant material

An agency or Minister may remove or redact exempt or irrelevant information from a document, to facilitate access to the relevant and non-exempt information in the same document. This is known as providing partial access to an edited copy of a document.

An agency or Minister may provide partial access to an edited copy of a document when:

• a document contains exempt or irrelevant information;
• it is practicable to provide access to an edited copy with exempt or irrelevant information removed; and
• the applicant wishes to receive an edited copy.³

Editing a document to provide partial access is one way to fulfil the object of the Act to extend as far as possible the right of the community to access government held information. It requires an agency or Minister to provide access to part of a document, instead of refusing access to the whole document.⁴

Removing irrelevant information can save time and resources, as an agency or Minister does not have to process irrelevant information. This may have included considering whether any exemptions apply to the irrelevant information and consulting with third parties.

There is nothing in the Act which prevents an agency or Minister from providing edited copies of documents, even where the criteria in section 25 are not met.

Where proper to do so, an agency or Minister may release irrelevant or exempt information to an applicant outside the Act, instead of redacting or removing the information.

An agency or Minister will need to consider providing an edited copy of a document if:

• the agency or Minister decides to refuse access to a document because it exempt; or
• the document contains information that is not relevant to the request.

There may be irrelevant information and exempt information in the same document.

Exempt document means that one or more of the exemptions in Part IV have been applied to refuse access to the document.

Irrelevant information is information which is clearly outside the scope, or beyond the terms of the applicant’s request.

An agency or Minister should consider the overall context in which the request is made, and appreciate that an applicant cannot necessarily be expected to have an intimate knowledge of the subject matter of the documents they seek or the inner workings of government.

In many instances, an applicant will not know the types of documents or information held by an agency or Minister, or how to describe the documents they seek. This requires an agency and Minister to refrain from taking an artificial or strained interpretation of the words used in a request, and to interpret the request beneficially when considering whether information is or is not irrelevant.⁶

Common circumstances where information is generally considered irrelevant to a request include:

• information that an applicant specifically agrees to exclude from the scope of a request (for example, an applicant may agree to exclude personal information of third parties);
• information added to a document after a request is received, for example printing or email headers;
• a document created after a request is received;
• a document falling outside a specified date range requested by an applicant.

The word ‘practicable’ is not defined in the Act. It is not a precise term; it refers to a legislative intention to apply common-sense principles.¹⁰ The definition in the Macquarie Dictionary defines ‘practicable’ as ‘capable of being put into practice, done or effected, especially with the available means or with reason or prudence; feasible’. The Oxford English Dictionary definition is ‘capable of being put into practice, carried out in action, effected, accomplished or done; feasible’.

Deciding whether it is ‘practicable’ to delete exempt or irrelevant information requires an agency or Minister to consider:

• the effort involved in making the deletions from a resources point of view;¹¹ and
• the effectiveness of those deletions – that is, whether the edited document still has meaning.¹²

In determining the effort involved in editing a document, an agency or Minister may consider the following questions:

• Is editing or deleting information capable of being carried out?
• What is the nature and extent of the work involved in deciding on and making the deletions to the document?
• Does the agency or Minister’s office have the resources to edit the document?

It is practicable to edit a document if to do so would not require substantial time and effort.

VCAT has held that deletion is not practicable where:

• it would effectively reduce the document ‘to something which was meaningless, misleading or unintelligible’;¹⁷
• what remains would be ‘devoid of context’;¹⁸
• it would lead to unnecessary speculation as to what was missing¹⁹ or lead the reader to draw erroneous conclusions.²⁰

In many instances, an applicant would prefer to receive a copy of a document with irrelevant or exempt information deleted, as opposed to not receiving any information at all. If an applicant’s request is silent on whether they wish to receive a copy of the document with exempt or irrelevant material deleted, the agency or Minister should talk to the applicant to check whether they would like to receive an edited copy.

Where an applicant expresses no view as to receiving an edited document, and the document would objectively retain some meaning after editing, agencies and Ministers are encouraged to provide access.

When writing a notice of decision under section 27, an agency and Minister must:

• inform the applicant that the document is a copy of a document from which exempt or irrelevant matter has been deleted under section 25; and
• state its findings on each element of section 25, referring to the material on which those findings were based, and the reasons for the decision.