More than two years after it was meant to go to Cabinet, an assessment of whether the Government is meeting some of its open government commitments is still incomplete
The wait for a review of one of the Government’s key policies on openness and transparency has stretched into its third year, angering opposition MPs who say open government is more important than ever given the Covid-19 pandemic.
In 2018, the Government announced it would proactively release all Cabinet papers within 30 working days of a final decision, without people needing to file an Official Information Act request.
In his Cabinet paper recommending the move, Public Service Minister Chris Hipkins said a report back to Cabinet reviewing the policy and its effectiveness would take place by the start of December 2019.
Earlier this year, Newsroom reported that work was more than 18 months overdue, with Hipkins saying there was no particular reason for the delay.
Now, the Government has blamed the Delta outbreak for a further delay, meaning Cabinet will receive the review more than two years later than initially promised.
In a written statement, Hipkins told Newsroom: “Unfortunately we had to defer consideration of this paper when Auckland went into lockdown and the Government had to shift its focus onto other priorities.”
Hipkins said the Government was still committed to expanding the current proactive release requirements, and his intention was for that to happen “in the New Year”.
The goal was to have ministers seek recommendations from agencies around which advice should be proactively published, while new advice for the proactive release of OIA responses would be issued.
Hipkins also wanted to improve the collection and publication of data for both proactive release and OIAs, while the Government would consider the options for “a searchable platform for proactively released documents”.
“Democracies are more effective than autocracies because they integrate more perspectives into decision making … by holding vital information secret for longer, the Government ends up with more myopic and more costly decisions being made.”
– David Seymour, Act
National Party public service spokesman Simeon Brown told Newsroom the delay was representative of the Government’s “go-slow” when it came to delivering on promises of greater transparency.
“Of course Covid’s got in the way, but actually at the same time, the proactive release of information around Covid, the significant decisions that are being made, and the advice behind that is critical for New Zealanders to understand that, so this is an important piece of work and they should be getting on and doing it.”
While proactive releases were helpful in theory, in practice the information was being published much more slowly than statutory OIA timeframes and in a way designed to avoid public scrutiny.
“If they are going to do this, they should do it properly, they should do it genuinely and they should make sure that actually they are doing it in a timely fashion as well – and what we’re seeing is quite the opposite.”
ACT leader David Seymour told Newsroom the Government had “used its information advantage as a political tool” throughout the Covid-19 response.
Seymour said the delays in ‘proactively’ releasing information had been brought into sharp relief by Director-General of Health Dr Ashley Bloomfield disclosing public health advice to the Waitangi Tribunal’s Covid response hearing, much more swiftly and thoroughly than had been the case to date.
“Democracies are more effective than autocracies because they integrate more perspectives into decision making … by holding vital information secret for longer, the Government ends up with more myopic and more costly decisions being made.”
Speaking to Newsroom in June, Hipkins said the proactive release policy had been a net positive by reducing the workload on ministers’ offices, and was why he had been releasing not just Cabinet papers but all ministerial advice he received.
“When I started doing it, it was a fairly scary concept for the public service and therefore, that sort of transferred to ministers in the things that the public service were saying: ‘This will be terrible, these are all the dire consequences that would come from it’…
“If I’d gone to Cabinet when we did the proactive release of Cabinet papers and said I wanted to go the whole hog, I don’t think it would have gone through.”
