This is the best summary I could come up with:
On Tuesday, Hardiman gave comprehensive and damning evidence to a Senate inquiry exploring FoI problems about his time at the OAIC and Falk’s leadership.
He alleged to the Senate inquiry that Falk had attempted to intimidate him after his resignation, saying he caught a bus to Sydney to meet with her instead of flying, to save money for his vastly under-resourced branch.
Hardiman spoke of deep cultural problems, saying FoI staff were in a state of “complete overwhelm” and that “cycles of panic” gripped the agency prior to Senate estimates hearings and at key moments in a federal court case challenging the lawfulness of delays to its completion of FoI reviews, brought by former senator Rex Patrick.
Greens senator David Shoebridge said he was “deeply disturbed” that the OAIC allowed a “false narrative to be given to the federal court to defend Mr Patrick’s legal proceedings”.
He spoke of being left “flabbergasted” after meetings with Falk last year, in which he pointed out the “screamingly obvious issue” that he did not have enough staff to get through the massive backlog in FoI review cases.
“The information commissioner said to me that I should not be involving myself in these matters, in other words in the restructure, thinking about the structure of the team, how to manage the workload, how to increase work flows within the IC review caseload,” he said.
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