An amendment after 30 years is both difficult to implement and can undermine the integrity of the records. Draft recommendation 20.5. The FOI Act should be amended to provide that records in the open period may not be amended. Annotating records in the open period 20.19 It is not, however, the Commission's intention that principles of privacy as reflected in the Privacy Act should be eroded. The right under the FOI Act to add an annotation to a record in the open access period should therefore be retained.
Annotation involves placing an amending statement on the record.
The statement is written by the applicant, and the agency may add comments to the statement. Under the FOI Act a right to annotate, unlike a request to amend, cannot be refused unless the annotating statement is irrelevant, defamatory or unnecessarily voluminous. As there are only minor grounds for refusal of annotation, there should be little need to 'forum shop' if the rights under the FOI Act and the archives legislation are identical. The right under the archives legislation should be restricted, as under the FOI Act, to the record subject. As existing administrative procedures for the annotation of ASIO records show, the discretionary power of the NAA could be used to provide next of kin with the ability to annotate in appropriate and exceptional cases where the record subject is deceased.