Not a great result

New Zealand is the 4th most transparent country in the world, according to the 2013 Global Open Data Barometer. But its a poor fourth, well behind third-ranked Sweden, and barely ahead of 5th-ranked Norway and Denmark. Digging into the numbers, we do well for impacts (particularly political impacts), but poorly on actual implementation, with particular gaps around government spending, the companies register, and public transport timetables (and mediocre results for health and education). In other words, we could do a lot better than we are doing, and our ranking is more a reflection of how crap everybody else is than of any real achievement on our part. Still, the foundations are there, and given some work by the government, we should expect to do a lot better in the future.