Open government and freedom of information are pet issues of mine, so I was pleased today to see that the Greens have released an open government policy. None of the other parties have one (though most have policy on the areas of the EFA it touches on), but hopefully they will be forced to respond or at least start thinking about it.
As for the policy itself, it looks pretty good. The Greens want to strengthen the Electoral Finance Act and make it illegal to circumvent the ban on large anonymous donations. They'll get no disagreement from me there. They also want to introduce fixed election dates, to prevent the government of the day trying to manipulate the outcome by manipulating the date, which again seems sensible (and as a bonus would require us to codify some of the rules around government formation and mid-term dissolutions, all of which needs to be done anyway). And they'd shift power from the executive to parliament, by requiring Parliament to formally ratify treaties, which again is a good idea.
But it's the topic of official information and the OIA where the policy really shines. The Greens want to strengthen the OIA, extend it to cover Parliament (with an exception for communications with constituents) and consultants, strengthen disclosure requirements and tighten up the reasons for withholding information to broaden access. They'd ensure that public servants received proper training in how to apply the OIA - something which desperately needs to be done. And they'd require prospective release of all Cabinet decisions unless there was good reason for withholding them, so we could really see what our government was doing.
There are two areas where the policy falls down. The first is judicial information; the Law Commission has recently recommended a Court Information Act modelled on the OIA to bring freedom of information to the courts (where the pre-OIA culture of secrecy is still alive and well). The Greens should be pressing for this. Secondly, while there are some moves to tighten up electoral finance at local body level, it doesn't go far enough. The 2007 local body elections revealed a pressing need for this - we had large anonymous donations in Christchurch, and money laundering trusts in Palmerston North, and no doubt abuses elsewhere. While the thresholds should be lower, the rules should be broadly the same for all elections. Otherwise, we simply invite corruption.
Overall, its a comprehensive and substantive policy that deserves a lot of attention. Which probably means it will sink without a trace. But we should all be asking the major parties: what will you do to improve open government?
