This highlights one of my personal favourite ways to attack this problem, itemised cost breakdowns. If they were required by law to keep sufficiently detailed

This highlights one of my personal favourite ways to attack this problem, itemised cost breakdowns. If they were required by law to keep sufficiently detailed account of the government money they are using, and while making these public by default might be hard to convince people of (due to obvious questions about commercial in confidence information)… just requiring them to exist as government records of the project opens a pathway for the existing FOI processes to grant access to these for public inspection when it’s in the public interest. I really struggle to image how a FOI request to produce the itemised cost documentation of the 1.7 million dollar public toilet, might possibly not be in the public interest.