[aussie500]

Aussie500 - how much did they charge ?  Is there a set fee published somewhere, or do they just "roll their own invoice ?"

Well while they have a set cost they charge you for all the different things required for each request, which they set out some where on their FOI page, they first included $280 in photocopying charges, just to put some digital images on some discs. Took them a month to reply when I contested that extra charge. So they are not above making up a few extra costs to raise a bit of revenue. And they will take the full time allowed to make you wait as long as possible. I will not say how much it cost me in the end, but I consider it too much for what little of use I got out of them, and it was really way more than I could afford at the time. But if they had given me the images I wanted with at least some GPS metadata still in them, I would have been happy.

If anyone wants to try their turn at getting anything useful under FOI, they will send you out a prelimanary charges quote, see if you are will to pay that amount, it costs nothing to put a request in, you can always say no, if you do not like the cost. Or you can contest the charges and try and get a discount, I did try to get it whittled down a bit more, but they truned down the public interest angle, and I would have had to have sent more info on the financial hardship attempt, which would have taken another 30 days for them to respond. I just agreed to pay it.

The way they are stalling, saying they are still trying to get the images, I would say there was a limit on the time you can complain you were not happy with what you got. Will have to look into it soon.