Email of 8 September 2009 to the Adviser of the Prime Minister’s Department

Dear Ms Huegill,

Thanks for your email of 27 August 2009.

You wrote: ‘The Prime Minister’s Office does not have any other records relating to your various letters, which is part of the reason why your requests were transferred to the Department’ (bold added). If that was the case, please disclose the declaration from the PMO that the PMO ‘does not have any records relating to’ Ms Rebecca Irwin’s letter of 16 December 2008 and Ms Sarah Adams’s letter of 23 February 2009.

According to my request the LP branch has successfully searched the Slipstream records relating to its letter of 26 August 2008. I have difficulty to understand why Ms MacDowell could not forward my request back to the PMO while she could not access documents held by the PMO. In his letter of 10 July Mr David Macgill wrote ‘Each agency is responsible for its own decisions under the FOI Act’. Please forward my FOI inquiry back to the PMO and let the PMO make its decision.

In Ms MacDowell’s letter of 20 July 2009, she wrote: ‘As with your previous request, the subject-matter of your request is more closely connected with the functions of the department. Accordingly, your request has been transferred to the department in accordance with paragraph 16(1)(b) of the FOI Act’. On face of it she did not declare in her letter of 20 July that ‘The Prime Minister does not have any other records relating to your various letters’. In her letter he mentioned my letter of 7 July 2008 to the Prime Minister, Mr Macgill’s letter of 10 July 2009 and Ms McKivat’s letter of 24 April 2009. Both Mr Macgill’s letter and Ms McKivat’s letter are responses to my FOI inquiry of 9 September 2008 relating to my letter of July 2008. Ms MacDowell should not mix up the present FOI inquiry arose from my letters of 8 May 2009 to the Prime Minister, which is about both Ms Rebecca Irwin’s letter of 16 December 2008 and Ms Sarah Adams’s letter of 23 February 2009, with the previous FOI inquiry.

Enclosures:

Ms Kim Huegill’s email of 27 August 2009