Category Archives: Projects

Balancing Transparency, Safety and Public Interest on Right to Know

By Ben Fairless | Published: November 11, 2025

In December last year we made a difficult decision to no longer allow people to make requests to the Classification Board or the Classification Review Board for documents related to MA 15+, R 18+, X 18+, or RC content using Right to Know. We did this after careful consideration of the risks such content poses […]

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“Strengthening” FOI or sabotaging It? Why we oppose the FOI Amendment Bill 2025

By Ben Fairless | Published: September 8, 2025

The Albanese Government has introduced the Freedom of Information Amendment Bill 2025, presented as a reform to “strengthen” the FOI framework. According to the Attorney-General’s press release, the Bill aims to modernise Freedom of Information (FOI) by: The OpenAustralia Foundation, the charity behind the Right to Know Freedom of Information service, strongly opposes these changes as they will make it harder for […]

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Our Submission: Changes to Part 3 of the FOI Guidelines

By Ben Fairless | Published: June 24, 2025

We have made a submission to the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner (OAIC), who were consulting on changes they proposed to make to Part 3 — Processing and deciding FOI requests of their FOI Guidelines. The FOI Guidelines are detail how the Information Commissioner expects authorities to handle FOI requests. We’ve shared our feedback […]

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Why you can’t request external reviews via Right to Know

By Ben Fairless | Published: May 29, 2025

We’ve recently updated the page for the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner, also known as the OAIC, to make it clear people can’t use Right to Know to make FOI review applications. We’ve done this after seeing an increase in the number of external review requests and complaints being made via Right to Know. […]

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Do the teal independents always vote with the Greens?

By Mackay Ash | Published: April 25, 2025

We have been alerted to some political advertising that claims to show that teal independents are voting with the Greens Party over 70% of the time. We cannot say for sure whether this is true or not, and likely no one else can either because that sort of information is not currently recorded anywhere, officially […]

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The increase of Yimbyism on Planning Alerts

By Eiddwen Jeffery | Published: March 5, 2025

Australia’s most recent housing turf war has found its way into the comments section of Planning Alerts. A look into the Yimby movement and its presence on the site. 

In 2024, we observed a new trend on our site. Users supporting individual Development Alerts were commenting not only how a particular application would benefit their local area, but also….

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Introducing the biggest Planning Alerts redesign in fourteen years

By Matthew Landauer | Published: June 25, 2024

We originally launched Planning Alerts in October 2009. That feels like a lifetime ago. In that time all sorts of features have been added, there have been visual redesigns, and we’ve introduced many little improvements and fixes. Yet nothing we have done before feels as substantial and meaningful as what we’re launching today.  On the […]

Also posted in Announcement, PlanningAlerts.org.au | 2 Responses

They Vote For You – There’s something wrong with Peter Dutton’s voting record!

By Mackay Ash | Published: September 1, 2023

You may have seen this screenshot showing Opposition Leader Peter Dutton as a supporter of a constitutionally enshrined First Nations Voice in parliament. If this looks wrong to you, it’s because it is. Several votes on the Constitution Alteration (Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Voice) 2023 were erroneously connected to this policy, when they were […]

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Journey to Improving Planning Alerts: A Service Designer’s Perspective – Part 3 Toolkit for Service Improvement

By Sabina Popin | Published: June 8, 2023

Guest post by Service Designer and Researcher, Sabina Popin This blog post is the grand finale in our three-part series on the recent Planning Alerts Service Improvement project. I kicked off the series with a bird’s eye view of the project, and the sequel dove deeper into the approach, research, insights, opportunities, and concepts. Now, […]

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Journey to Improving Planning Alerts: A Service Designer’s Perspective – Part 2 Research, Testing and Insights

By Sabina Popin | Published: May 31, 2023

Guest post by Service Designer and Researcher, Sabina Popin This post is part of a three part series about the recent project on Planning Alerts Service Improvement. In the previous post I outlined the entirety of the project in brief. In this post you get to read in more depth about the epic journey we’ve […]

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