Public Address | Cafe | Hard News: Media Take: The creeping politicisation of the OIA

nzlemming

Wed, 29 Oct 2014 17:09:02 +1300

Always good fun when they screw up the redaction

David Hood

Fri, 24 Oct 2014 22:56:34 +1300

From OIAs with a response in the FYI data , the mean time for responses by department

[1] "Associate Minister for Social Development (n=1) 4"
[2] "Associate Minister of Education (n=1) 1"
[3] "Associate Minister of Health (n=1) 20"
[4] "Associate Minister of Immigration (n=1) 1"
[5] "Attorney-General (n=3) 9.67"…

David Hood

Fri, 24 Oct 2014 22:33:25 +1300

For bodies that have open OIAs registered with FYI where those OIAs are more than 60 days old, what percentage are the number of those OIAs of all OIAs received by that body. Or in less technical terms, how many of each bodies OIAs have fallen into the void (only…

David Hood

Fri, 24 Oct 2014 21:44:52 +1300

I recalculated on the basis of IS's comments, pulling the 60 and 90 day back earlier into time (by an amount depending on the period being checked) it does really change anything about the fast OIAs getting faster and the slow OIAs getting slower. I should also note there was…

nzlemming

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 14:35:06 +1300

I'm also reminded of a manager I had earlier who constantly said "perception is reality". Her problem was that she regarded it as a prescription for success ("manage the perception and keep the reality hidden") rather than a warning ("as people perceive you, so will they treat you"), which is…

nzlemming

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 14:28:56 +1300

Instead of having someone at a ministry spending time and resources trying to answer how many tire punctures ministerial limousines have had over the last ten years, you are given access to the maintenance records with the understanding that you can figure it out yourself from there.

Sometimes, documents without…

Idiot Savant

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 14:09:39 +1300

You can already…

Steve Barnes

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 14:05:16 +1300

So it is neither here nor there, just a kind of interpretation of title and role, but we are non the wiser re what happens, and what happened.

I have a broom like that, two new handles and three new heads but its still my broom.

Jarno van der Linden

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 13:52:49 +1300

But it is an access to documents law, not an access to information law

In the age of data journalism, would that be the more desirable approach?

Instead of having someone at a ministry spending time and resources trying to answer how many tire punctures ministerial limousines have had over…

Idiot Savant

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 13:01:46 +1300

There's been a definite tactic pre-election of delaying even inconsequential requests until after the election, which will have affected the 60- and 90-day trends.

David Hood

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 12:46:28 +1300

Here are percentages of OIAs resolved in 20, 30, 60 and 90 days.

I would interpret (you might want to open this graph in a new window) that as the government has gotten fast at releasing information it is happy to have released (the 20 days level), but that hasn't…

giovanni tiso

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 11:26:22 +1300

To all those getting caught up in the "But your guys did it first" arguments...

...remember "your guys" is a meaningless phrase. On questions of economics and governance New Zealand has had an interrupted series of right wing governments by most international standards. It's not a case of "but it…

Russell Brown

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 10:52:19 +1300

I’ve just posted a tidied-up version of Fish’s speech notes. go read it here.

Tinakori

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 10:34:52 +1300

I don't know about MORST but the non departmental staffer in the Minister of Revenue's office was a secondee from an accounting firm brought in for his expertise in tax. There was a comparable one in the Minister of Finance's office who provided a private sector perspective to the MOF.…

Matthew Hooton

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 06:40:03 +1300

There is a very big difference between 30 days and two years.

Matthew Hooton

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 06:38:40 +1300

It was more than that. In the "old days" there was one sometimes two press secretaries in each office who had reasonably amounts of actual work to do who also gave their ministers political advice when required (in most cases, from their perspective as former journalists). Then each office got…

Trevor Nicholls

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 01:26:31 +1300

The problem is blindingly simple: the OIA system is badly broken from the POV of the public, but it functions really well from the POV of the Government of the day. Somehow the incentives have to shift – because controlling and distorting the flow of information is a very effective…

nzlemming

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 01:06:08 +1300

Have you used a government document management system?

I did say "wit" as well as "will"...

I'll allow that most agencies can't even use document styles properly, but that doesn't mean you don't try. The problem is they won't consider trying.

nzlemming

Thu, 23 Oct 2014 01:02:05 +1300

There most definitely were not in the Bolger governments.

Not correct. I worked in 2 different agencies under National in the 90s – IRD and MoRST. Both ministers had advisors in their office who were not sourced from the agencies in their portfolios. I am aware of many others.

izogi

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 23:21:05 +1300

A lot of this would go away if agencies published everything unless there was a good reason not to.

Isolating the Ombudsman so that its line of funding can't be directly influenced by Parliament also wouldn't go astray, and neither would financially cutting into agencies' budgets when their actions result…

David Hood

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 23:07:58 +1300

1st graph the long term trend is for about half of OIA requests to be resolved in twenty days or less. This hasn't changed much in two years in the FYI data. This says nothing about how long the post-20 day ones have been taking

Sacha

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 22:40:04 +1300

the problem has definitely gotten a lot worse under National, and in the last 2-3 years particularly

I have no reason to doubt David Fisher when he says it is the worst he has seen in 25 years. That's shameful.

Andrew E

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 22:34:14 +1300

I understand the Swedish norm for responding to an access to documents request is 24 hours. But it is an access to documents law, not an access to information law; there are important differences.

Sacha

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 22:31:00 +1300

Agencies have five days in which to respond to information requests, via the OEP or direct to the agency. They provide the documents by email, fax or regular mail, normally within two to three days.

Now there's a benchmark.

Marc C

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 22:26:48 +1300

Counter arguments, no matter what, OIA, dishonest revelations and so forth, perhaps re consider:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GxtwzU0-wPM&list=PLC77C52AC6CE48667&index=2

Abit "heavy", but I stand by it!!!

NBH

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 22:23:44 +1300

I suspect that the identification of ministerial advisors as political advisors in that study was made to give the impression the introduction of the political advisors in bulk under Labour was a simple and not very significant progression from the existing setup.

It's a bit rough to accuse the only…

Andrew E

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 22:11:48 +1300

re: proactive publication, readers might be interested in this report on how the Norwegian Freedom of Information Act (PDF in English) works.

From that article:
Norway’s Freedom of Information Act cuts across state, county and municipal governments. It interfaces with the Archives Act and Noark by…

Greville Whittle

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 20:43:27 +1300

To all those getting caught up in the "But your guys did it first" arguments:

Most people here agree it's a big problem, and I think we see it as a problem no matter who is doing it.

I think we should take the line "This problem is happening, we…

andin

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 19:42:05 +1300

Some people are natural control freaks and others are not.
So we're back to being dependent on how control freakish a person in a position of power happens to be!
And I was hoping a governmental future was going to get past all that.
Hmm... peoples will be peoples, just…

Marc C

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 19:19:15 +1300

Lower profile she has, getting away with the same, but she has a number of "areas" now, and they all seem to be subordinate, of sorts, so less "profile".

Joe Wylie

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 19:05:39 +1300

Not helping, Joe. I’m happy to have people offer different perspectives here, and I think it’s possible to critique the perspective without attacking the person like that.
It would have been better if I'd refrained. That said, I can't see any way around cultivating a level of self-abasement in order…

Sacha

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:58:02 +1300

the NSA base in Northland

Warkworth, you mean

Sacha

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:57:10 +1300

she's doing the same thing in the new role – hardly consistent with hiding it, as a motivation.

Marc C

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:54:50 +1300

So it is neither here nor there, just a kind of interpretation of title and role, but we are non the wiser re what happens, and what happened.

Marc C

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:52:47 +1300

Sacha, it is always an expert tactical move, to shift people that "may" get into "trouble" into new "competency areas", so to make them look like improving and enhancing their careers.

The "clutter" they may have left behind is conveniently shifted into the background, by putting the focus onto the…

Tinakori

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:46:08 +1300

To which I would add the distinctions I was making were most definitely not semantic but substantive.

Tinakori

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:43:51 +1300

39 Political advisors in 1998 – they must have been hiding them in the Beehive basement or perhaps they were part of the NSA base in Northland Ed Snowden is convinced we have. I suspect that the identification of ministerial advisors as political advisors in that study was made to…

Sacha

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:43:04 +1300

I take your point about the extra workload but I do like the notion of government releasing well-structured info that others can do stuff with. Open Govt.

How about a blanket ruling that some classes of document are always to be published openly in structured electronic form (which might also…

Russell Brown

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:40:20 +1300

To a point-scoring partisan suckhole it all comes down to semantics.

Not helping, Joe. I'm happy to have people offer different perspectives here, and I think it's possible to critique the perspective without attacking the person like that.

Sacha

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:28:43 +1300

Au contraire. Bennett is far from in trouble. She is being deployed to spread the 'investment' approach introduced in MSD across more government agencies, in what Bill English was describing before the election as the biggest shake-up of the public service in 50 years. But did we see him pressed…

Marc C

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:16:44 +1300

The "watchdog" is being challenged, by the way, I cannot disclose more!

Matthew Hooton

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:10:29 +1300

Tinakori is right. There were no dedicated "political advisors" in the 1990s. The press secretary would provide political advice, but had to take media calls, write media releases and speeches, work with the department etc. These new "ministerial advisers" must have a great life – they get to play in…

B Jones

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 18:10:21 +1300

Not if you build those steps into document creation. Most government agencies use a document management system, many have implemented EDRMS – all the tools are there, just not the wit nor will to use them.

Have you used a government document management system? You want bureaucrats to add more…

Joe Wylie

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 17:49:51 +1300

There most definitely were not in the Bolger governments. I can think of one outside the Prime Minister’s Office and they were a former electorate secretary. They also did not have the political advisor title. I can think of some troubleshooters in various offices but they weren’t political advisors and…

Marc C

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 17:43:18 +1300

Does anybody wonder now, why Paula Benefit did suddenly want to move to have other "portfolios"? It is blatantly obvious, that her inexcusable conduct as Minister was going to get back to her and haunt her, in that MSD portfolio at least.

Paula must have thought: "Hey, this is getting…

Marc C

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 17:25:31 +1300

Within the circles I move in, abuse of the OIA is "standard" practice. It may also have been difficult to get some info out of government departments and ministries under the last Labour government, but it has certainly been MUCH, MUCH worse since 2008.

While MSD used to be reasonable…

NBH

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 17:13:00 +1300

There most definitely were not in the Bolger governments. I can think of one outside the Prime Minister's Office and they were a former electorate secretary

I'm not sure that Eichbaum's work – which is pretty the definitive research into this in NZ – bears this out. For e.g. in…

David Hood

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 17:03:45 +1300

For the R users, this gets the pertinent data into a data frame, but I haven't had time to clean up the dates etc.

library(downloader)
download("https://gist.githubusercontent.com/wombleton/934dde2686b7a432dc52/raw/0bbff139cecffa02f947cbcca1b4703ab45070df/output.json", "output.json")
library(jsonlite)
tabdata <- fromJSON("output.json", flatten=TRUE)$requests

Tinakori

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 16:19:39 +1300

"Fail. There were plenty of political advisors in the 90's under Bolger/Shipley/ et al"

There most definitely were not in the Bolger governments. I can think of one outside the Prime Minister's Office and they were a former electorate secretary. They also did not have the political advisor title. I…

Rowan Crawford

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 16:05:06 +1300

To pass these on, I did some stats on OIA requests. Bear in mind that the numbers fyi.org.nz sees are a small fraction of total OIAs, and that the categorisation relies on the users.

This is a rolling six month outstanding count/median time/average time: https://gist.github.com/wombleton/9477e88cc0a3de0236ab

Note that the "outstanding" count…

Dean Wallis

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 15:34:34 +1300

Could/would/should this entire topic be one that we can expect the MSM to investigate and report on?

Or have they started already?
Mormon address mystery surrounding undergarments

Idiot Savant

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 15:27:59 +1300

"Extending the OIA to Parliament" means precisely Parliamentary Services, select committees, MP's expenses etc (which are a public money and so subject to public scrutiny). Pretending anyone wants it to go beyond that into the affairs of political parties is simply mischevious.

nzlemming

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 15:19:29 +1300

A scorching Dom Post editorial on the same topic:

Hmmm. I think this is more of a straw man than a denunciation.

Wakem is to do a review of the OIA, but these remarks suggest she is not the right person to do it.
They suggest a disturbing timidity in…

Idiot Savant

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 15:17:23 +1300

Meanwhile, Judith Collins' OIA logs mysteriously don't record requests from her favourite sewerblogger:

http://norightturn.blogspot.co.nz/2014/10/judith-collins-two-tier-oia-service.html

Idiot Savant

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 15:06:33 +1300

This would expand the amount of information public servants need to assess for "good reason" from the small amount currently requested to everything they produce.

Except that most documents are released almost entirely unredacted, apart from the names and contact information of junior public servants. But as nzlemming notes, this…

nzlemming

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 15:02:05 +1300

The appearance under Labour of political advisors in all offices

Fail. There were plenty of political advisors in the 90's under Bolger/Shipley/ et al

You're allowed your own opinions, you're not allowed your own facts.

nzlemming

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 14:59:35 +1300

This would expand the amount of information public servants need to assess for “good reason” from the small amount currently requested to everything they produce.

Not if you build those steps into document creation. Most government agencies use a document management system, many have implemented EDRMS – all the tools…

nzlemming

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 14:57:09 +1300

The person who needs to be held accountable here is Iain Rennie. “As State Services Commissioner, I see my role as a guardian of political neutrality across the State Services,”

He has failed, and must be held to account.

The SSC has been a lap puppy/figleaf since the State Sector…

nzlemming

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 14:55:10 +1300

And I’ll third/fourth the support for proactive release. If you release stuff, people don’t request it. It saves work, while keeping the public informed. Only pathological secrecry would see that as a bad thing.

The problem agencies face now is that we don't trust them anymore. Even if they release…

Tinakori

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 14:34:57 +1300

I would say crept rather than creeping and I would date the crept to Labour in 1999. Before that there were wild variations in performance depending on the department and the Minister and the Minister's staff. Some people are natural control freaks and others are not. What you got before…

B Jones

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 14:26:07 +1300

A lot of this would go away if agencies published everything unless there was a good reason not to. It would save them time and resources

No it wouldn't. This would expand the amount of information public servants need to assess for "good reason" from the small amount currently requested…

Sacha

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 14:18:23 +1300

Paula Bennett will be just the person for that task..

Trevor Nicholls

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 13:30:38 +1300

The problem isn't that the OIA is a burden, its that some public servants and most politicians view it as one.

I'd like to know how many government salaries are invested in burying information. And how many in prettying it up before letting the public see it. The calculus isn't…

Matt Crawford

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 13:26:06 +1300

The person who needs to be held accountable here is Iain Rennie. “As State Services Commissioner, I see my role as a guardian of political neutrality across the State Services,”

He has failed, and must be held to account.

Russell Brown

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 13:01:53 +1300

A scorching Dom Post editorial on the same topic:

The Official Information Act seeks to give the people access to government as of right. If the government blocks or impedes that access, it is spurning that right.

Key's statement was bad enough. It was worse to hear the Chief Ombudsman,…

Idiot Savant

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 12:53:43 +1300

I realise that there is another side to this: the sheer weight of requests, often themselves highly political, or near-vexatious, that suck up resources.

Except that there aren't that many requests. While the government hasn't implemented the Law Commissions' reccomendation to keep stats, the work I did on it a…

nzlemming

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 12:51:14 +1300

I was thinking this same thing as I watched the show last night. If the default was “we publish data”, and then you provided reasons not to, then many OIA requests would become irrelevant – you’d simply direct them to the place that all the data got dumped.

Correct. We…

nzlemming

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 12:49:22 +1300

The Auditor-General’s mandate and responsibilities are determined by the Public Audit Act 2001. I’m sure someone will promptly correct me if I’m wrong, but that doesn’t include OIA/LGOIMA compliance.

I wasn't talking about OIA compliance but actually adhering to the legislation and due process that agencies are presumed to be…

Kyle Matthews

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 12:31:27 +1300

A lot of this would go away if agencies published everything unless there was a good reason not to.

I was thinking this same thing as I watched the show last night. If the default was "we publish data", and then you provided reasons not to, then many OIA requests…

Craig Ranapia

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 12:03:04 +1300

One more thing worth noting from Fish’s speech: the malign effect of the “no surprises” policy, which sees nearly every released funnelled through a ministerial office and, effectively, be subject to ministerial sign-off.

The other side of the equation, and one that shouldn't be neglected, is local government and district…

Craig Ranapia

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 11:54:49 +1300

Sadly, the Auditor-General doesn’t see it as part of their role to police whether agencies are living up to their legislative requirements.

The Auditor-General's mandate and responsibilities are determined by the Public Audit Act 2001. I'm sure someone will promptly correct me if I'm wrong, but that doesn't include OIA/LGOIMA…

Russell Brown

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 11:49:33 +1300

So you can have good, decent public servants acting with the public interest and the law uppermost…

Craig Ranapia

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 11:49:15 +1300

I realise that there is another side to this: the sheer weight of requests, often themselves highly political, or near-vexatious, that suck up resources.

I’m not sympathetic. If that’s a genuine problem (and I’m not saying it isn’t) then the solution is to appropriately amend the legislation in a manner…

Sacha

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 11:35:04 +1300

A lot of this would go away if agencies published everything unless there was a good reason not to.

Great idea. We pay for their work. Beyond well-defined privacy, commercial and military grounds it should all be published where the public and organisations can review and make use of it.

Danyl Mclauchlan

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 11:27:03 +1300

Fisher gave a speech to around a hundred public officials in Wellington last week, in which he traced a change that he believes took hold in the last term of the Clark government and has created an environment dominated by media management, obstruction and political interference.

Legend has it the…

nzlemming

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 11:20:18 +1300

I realise that there is another side to this: the sheer weight of requests, often themselves highly political, or near-vexatious, that suck up resources.

A lot of this would go away if agencies published everything unless there was a good reason not to. It would save them time and resources…

Russell Brown

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 11:01:36 +1300

I hope the NZ Herald will.post the presentation. I wish I had been there. Was it videoed by them.

No. It was Chatham House rules, but that only applied to the interaction with the officials, not the text of the speech itself.

Alastair Thompson

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 10:57:45 +1300

I hope the NZ Herald will.post the presentation. I wish I had been there. Was it videoed by them.

Public Address

Wed, 22 Oct 2014 10:57:45 +1300

Discussion from blog post.