My OIA performance statistics project is winding up, and I'm basically down to waiting for the stragglers. So far I have complete data for 19 out of 34 government departments and 24 out of 28 Ministers. But an interesting disparity has already emerged from the partial data:
- The average on-time rate across all departments so far is 88.6%. The average on-time rate across all Ministers is 71.4%.
- Nine departments have an on-time rate of more than 90%, but only four Ministers do (and one of those is from partial results).
- Five Ministers had an on-time rate of 50% or less. No department was this bad.
(Unfortunately it may take a while for final results to come out - I'm currently waiting on two Ombudsmen's complaints, a couple of incompetent Ministers, a few more who I had to go back and ask to go through paper, and some of the smaller departments who I asked late. The current deadline on those requests is looking like the end of this month for Ministers, and it'll likely be the end of September before I get responses back from the remaining departments. Even then, there are some - the Police, Department of Labour, Ministry of Education, and likely IRD, whose record-keeping is inadequate and for whom robust statistics cannot be generated. Still, even a partial picture is better than nothing, and its already pointing at several Ministers and departments who need to get their shit together).
